4th graders will be engaged in eight units of study this year.
Unit 1: Personal Narratives
The first unit of Grade 4 CKLATM instruction contains 15 daily 90-minute lessons focusing on reading, writing, language, and speaking and listening. In this way, during their first few weeks of the school year, students are immediately immersed in engaging with the written word through reading and writing routines and a variety of whole-class, small group, partner, and independent activities. This offers a solid foundation for all the reading skills students will develop throughout the year. The unit also contains four Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiation of instruction.
In addition to reading and writing, students also engage in numerous other activities and exercises to reinforce the unit’s content. These include opportunities for kinesthetic and collaborative learning. Partner and small-group work encourages student accountability as their contributions become necessary for classmates’ success in an activity.
The readings we have selected for the unit are all grade-appropriate in content and text complexity. In addition, the texts have substantial literary merit and represent a spectrum of the American experience, written as they are from a variety of racial, cultural, and geographic perspectives.
UNIT 2: Empires in the Middle Ages
This introduction includes the necessary background information to teach the Empires in the Middle Ages unit. This unit contains 25 daily lessons, plus four Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiated instruction. Each entire lesson will require a total of 90 minutes. Lessons 15 and 25 are devoted to unit assessments.
As noted, four days are intended to be used as Pausing Point days. You may choose to use the first two in conjunction with the Mid-Unit Assessment (Lesson 15), and the next set of two at the end of the unit.
The Core Knowledge sequence is designed to build background knowledge coherently and cumulatively so that students can understand a full range of complex texts and engage in deep conversations about the world around them. Core Knowledge Language Arts is built upon the sequence and uses it to create a comprehensive ELA curriculum.
In the writing lessons, students will review the stages of the writing process and engage in an extended writing project. In this unit, students will use a graphic organizer to take notes on information presented in the Reader; paraphrase information from a text; assess information to form an opinion; and draft a persuasive paragraph.
UNIT 3: Poetry
This introduction includes the necessary background information to teach the Poetry unit. This unit contains fourteen daily lessons, a Unit Assessment, plus three Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiated instruction. Lessons and activities address various aspects of a comprehensive language arts curriculum. Each lesson will require a total of ninety minutes. Lesson 15 is devoted to a culminating Unit Assessment. It is recommended you spend no more than nineteen days total on this unit.
For many readers—adults and children alike—poetry can be challenging. Readers often find poems inaccessible, suspecting a secret meaning they cannot decode. In fact, poetry’s reliance on symbolic and figurative language opens up rather than closes off meaning, giving readers the power of personal interpretation. This unit gives students tools and strategies for approaching poetry, training them in the methods and devices poets use and equipping them to read and interpret both formal and free verse poems. It gives them continual opportunities to create poems themselves, allowing them to practice what they have learned.
The poems in this unit represent a wide variety of time periods, from Kshemendra’s twelfth-century treatise on the responsibilities of poets to the work of living writers such as Sherman Alexie and Harryette Mullen. We haven’t chosen poems written specifically for children; we have instead selected poems both younger and older readers will enjoy. The poets come from many backgrounds and nations; the poets included are European, Asian, African American, Native American, and Hispanic. The poems themselves are similarly diverse; some employ precise meter and rhyme schemes, while others use free verse. Uniting them all is their engagement with language and its potential.
A central goal of this unit is teaching students how to explore that potential. The American poet Emily Dickinson once compared poetry to “possibility,” perhaps a surprising metaphor in her time, but one that has proven apt. Poems are often multi-dimensional, using figurative language to yoke together apparent opposites, to allow imagination and creativity to flourish, to startle readers with glimpses of the world as it might be. Rather than conceal one secret meaning available only to privileged readers who understand how to unlock a poem, the best poems open themselves to many possible interpretations. To that end, this unit encourages students to express their views on a poem, and it shies away from listing one “correct” meaning.
That’s not to say that wrong interpretations are impossible—Walt Whitman, who died in 1892, did not write poems about World War I. However, many student responses are valid, so long as those interpretations are rationally supported by evidence from the poem’s text.
This unit, which focuses on poetry, is like others in this curriculum in routinely encouraging and enabling students to read texts closely and carefully. To accomplish that, and in recognition of the differences between poetry and other genres of writing, this unit’s structure, materials, and activities differ at times from those of other CKLA™ units. Throughout the unit, students practice close reading and writing. They learn about many of the formal elements of poetry as they identify those elements arising organically from the text.
They also pair that work with practicing as poets themselves. This allows them to demonstrate their understanding and analysis of the poems through creative application and to become detailed writers. In turn, this bolsters their ability to analyze others’ writing. These activities offer students a number of tools with which to approach poetry, building their confidence to interpret poems and their engagement in the task. Writing activities train students in the craft of poetry, celebrating their creative potential and imagination while training them to apply and master the knowledge they have gained from reading and understanding the unit’s poems. Activities allow students the chance to explore poetic devices, imitate strategies used by the poets they have studied, and learn to think as poets by considering how the formal choices they make influence the poem’s meaning.
A key aspect of the Poetry unit is encouraging and equipping students to write original poems. This allows for creative and imaginative expression, but it also affords students the opportunity to implement the poetic devices they have learned in the reading components of each lesson. The writing portion of the unit allows students to apply their new poetry knowledge, further solidifying their understanding of the craft of poetry. Throughout this unit, students will practice using the poetic devices exemplified by each poem. They will compose rhymes, similes, and metaphors; use repetition, anaphora, and alliteration; and plan, draft, and revise several original poems inspired by the poems studied in this unit.
The Poet’s Journal has been designed to reinforce the unit’s integration of reading and writing poetry. The journal resembles a writer’s notebook rather than a textbook or student workbook. By synthesizing reading materials, comprehension activities, and writing components, the Poet’s Journal indicates the extent to which reading, writing, and understanding poems are inherently connected. The Poet’s Journal also contains extra pages to encourage students to compose their own poems—something the unit’s final lesson will set them up to accomplish.
UNIT 4: Eureka! Student Inventor
Eureka! Student Inventor is a 10-day ELA Quest. Quests are narrative-driven units that immerse students in close reading adventures. Through them, students read complex literary and informational texts and consistently demonstrate their ability to find evidence and use it appropriately. Over the course of the Quest, students write routinely in opinion, informational, and narrative modes, adjusting style for the task and audience indicated. Beyond this, Quests are deliberately varied. Each aims to immerse students in a new world, with new content and challenges. Quests are also more flexible than other units. We have provided suggestions for how to customize the Quest throughout and encourage you to make your own variations to suit your students’ needs.
As they go through Eureka! Student Inventor, students read a range of informational texts about inventors, inventions, and the process of creation. In addition to close readings, students analyze objects and situations in the world around them, identify problems, create evidence-based solutions, and ultimately become inventors themselves. By routinely writing informational and opinion pieces, students practice research, observation, communication, and persuasion. They also engage in a range of collaborative discussions, sharing ideas and working in teams with defined roles and agreed-upon rules.
In Eureka! Student Inventor, students are contestants on the bizarre and exciting reality TV game show of the same name—a show in danger of cancellation because of a few . . . unfortunate . . . incidents last season. Students are divided into teams (labs) and participate in activities and challenges both in groups and individually. Guided by inventor-judges Jacques Cousteau, Hedy Lamarr, Thomas Edison, and George Washington Carver, as well as a host—you, the teacher—contestants learn about the process of invention through examples and experiments. Throughout the Quest, the judges will “interact” with students through videos and notes. Your role as host is the key to creating and maintaining the game-show “world.” We have provided host scripts throughout the unit and hope you will add in your own elements.
UNIT 5: Geology
This introduction includes the necessary background information to teach the Geology unit. This unit contains 15 daily lessons, plus four Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiated instruction. You may choose to use all four days at the end of the unit, or you may use one day immediately after Lesson 7 and three days at the end of the unit. If you use one Pausing Point day after Lesson 7, you may administer Activity Page PP.1 to assess students’ understanding of the content at this midpoint, or you may use the day to focus on writing, spelling, grammar, or morphology skills covered in Lessons 1–7. Each entire lesson will require a total of 90 minutes. Lesson 15 is devoted to a unit assessment. It is recommended that you spend no more than 19 days total on this unit.
In the writing lessons, students will review the stages of the writing process and engage in several short writing projects. In this unit, students will examine and explain similes; draft an informational pamphlet about tsunamis; write a wiki entry about a specific volcano; and create a descriptive paragraph about a type of rock or item in the rock cycle, incorporating literary devices they have encountered in previous Grade 4 units, such as alliteration, personification, and simile.
UNIT 6: Contemporary Fiction
This introduction includes the necessary background information to teach the Contemporary Fiction unit. This unit contains twelve daily lessons, a unit assessment, and three Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiated instruction. Lessons and activities address various aspects of a comprehensive language arts curriculum. Each lesson will require a total of 90 minutes. Lesson 13 is devoted to a culminating activity as a unit assessment. It is recommended you spend no more than 16 days total on this unit.
The Writer’s Journal serves as both student reader and workbook, with activity pages tied to each instructional lesson. The vignettes for each lesson are printed in full within the journal. All of the vignettes are presented together in the front of the Writer’s Journal, with the vignette number printed on them. The vignettes are also reprinted at the beginning of the first lesson in which they appear. These vignettes have the lesson number as well as the vignette number printed on them.
Activity pages within the Writer’s Journal provide practice for students to review material, answer questions, complete activities designed to increase their comprehension of that material, and compose original writing. Activities, which relate to specific vignettes, are color-coded accordingly. For example, activities using the vignette “My Name,” which is printed in purple, will be outlined in purple.
A key objective of the unit is teaching students to write narrative prose. This allows for creative and imaginative expression but also affords the opportunity to implement the skills students have learned in the reading components of the lessons. Throughout this unit, students will practice using literary elements they have explored in each vignette—for example the use of detailed descriptions, the building of aspiration as a theme, and the contrast between the protagonists’ perceptions and the perceptions of others. The unit asks students to compose a multi-chapter narrative; they build their stories throughout several lessons devoted to planning, drafting, and revising their work. In addition, students practice opinion writing using evidence from the text.
The Writer’s Journal is designed to reinforce the unit’s integration of reading and writing literature. By synthesizing reading materials, comprehension activities, and writing components, students will see that reading, writing, and understanding literature are inherently connected. It also contains extra pages to encourage students to compose their own text—something the unit’s final lesson will set them up to accomplish.
The Writer’s Journal also identifies two types of vocabulary: Core Vocabulary and Literary Vocabulary. Core Vocabulary words appear in the vignettes and are needed to understand their meaning. Literary Vocabulary words are terms used primarily in reading and interpreting literature; they are introduced directly in the lesson. Both sets of vocabulary are defined in both the lesson in which they appear and in the Writer’s Journal glossary.
UNIT 7: American Revolution
This introduction includes the necessary background information to teach the American Revolution unit. This unit contains 17 daily lessons, plus four Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiated instruction. You may choose to use all four days at the end of the unit, or you may use one day immediately after Lesson 7 and three days at the end of the unit. If you use one Pausing Point day after Lesson 7, you may administer Activity Page PP.1 to assess students’ understanding of the content at this midpoint, or you may use the day to focus on writing, spelling, grammar, or morphology skills covered in Lessons 1–7. Each entire lesson will require a total of 90 minutes. Lesson 17 is devoted to a unit assessment. It is recommended that you spend no more than 21 days total on this unit.
In the writing lessons, students will review the stages of the writing process and engage in an extended writing project. In this unit, students will enact and record key information from vignettes corresponding to the causes of the American Revolution. These activities will lead to the development of a five-paragraph cause and effect essay.
UNIT 8: Treasure Island
This introduction includes the necessary background information to teach the Treasure Island unit. This unit contains 19 daily lessons as well as four Pausing Point days that may be used for differentiated instruction. Each entire lesson will require a total of 90 minutes. Lesson 15 is devoted to a unit assessment.
In the writing lessons, students will engage in an extended writing project, while continuing to practice the various stages of the writing process. They will begin by drafting a character sketch and then will write, publish, and share an original adventure story. While working on the adventure story, students will focus on character development, dialogue, verb choice, and revision methods.
Additional resources:
FAST testing / aReading / Iowa Tier
Independent Reading Websites:
Fluency:
To see a list of reading vocabulary, click here.
To see supportive and enrichment activities, click here
To use a kid-friendly internet dictionary, click here.
To see possible assignments, click here.
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