Language Arts

“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.” - Frank Serafini

I teach language arts following the RRISD curriculum and curriculum pacing guides and incorporate children's literature that I hope feeds your student's love for reading and writing. In this section, you will see an overview of the school year (at a glance), my approach to language arts, advice for support, and resources to aid your student at home.

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STAAR Writing - April 9, 2019

STAAR Reading - May 14, 2019

Fourth Grade Year at a Glance

Getting Started During this unit, students will learn and practice important daily classroom routines and procedures for reading workshop, writing workshop, and balanced literacy components (specifically word study and grammar). In addition, teachers will use time provided in this unit to administer district assessments.

Reading Fiction & Writing Personal Narratives Unit Plan During this unit, fourth graders will read fiction and write personal narratives. The reading TEKS are bundled together to develop deeper understanding of the structure and elements of fiction (from third grade), including point of view, how events in a plot lead to future events, and understanding characters through their interactions and relationships. Students will draw conclusions about the theme of a literary work. Fourth graders will begin responding to literary text, while providing supporting text evidence. In writing workshop, students will use the writing process as they craft personal narratives. As part of the work in this unit, students will learn to see potential stories everywhere and begin to select one idea over another due to the significance the idea holds for the writer.

Explain This! Reading to Learn and Writing to Explain Your Ideas This unit bundles student expectations for reading expository texts and writing essays (expository compositions). Fourth graders will apply their understanding of the genre to their independent reading. In writing, students will choose a topic they are knowledgeable about and write essays (expository compositions) to explain an idea.

Words & Imagery - The Poet's Paintbrush In this unit, fourth graders make inferences about theme and the poet's message using textual support. Students focus on the structural elements of poetry as related to form (lyrical, free verse) and identify the author's use of similes and metaphors to produce imagery. Fourth graders will write poems that convey sensory details using the conventions of poetry (e.g., rhyme, meter, patterns of verse).

Reading Literary Nonfiction & Growing Our Quality of Writing In this unit, fourth graders will focus on applying a flexible range of reading strategies as they understand and draw conclusions about structural patterns and features of biographies and autobiographies. Students will make connections between common literary structures of fiction and literary nonfiction. In writing, students will build on the skills and strategies learned from unit 2 as they compose essays with increasing coherence, fluency and understanding of the expository genre.

Looking Deeper at Once Upon a Time During this unit fourth graders will summarize and explain the theme or message in a work, as well as compare and contrast the exploits of characters, especially trickster characters, in classical and traditional literature. Students will revisit the structure and elements of fiction, making connections to the similarities of plot structure in traditional and classical literature. Students will continue to develop metacognitive reading strategies and skills during both instructional and independent reading, etc. Students will continue to develop vocabulary strategies, as they determine the meaning of grade-level academic English words derived from Latin, Greek, or other linguistic roots and affixes; use the context of the sentence (e.g., in-sentence example or definition) to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words or multiple meaning words; and use a dictionary or glossary to determine the meanings, syllabication, and pronunciation of unknown words. In writing, students will review, build on, and advance their craft of writing personal narratives, including strengthening their use of oral and written conventions and their personal writing process. Students will revise and edit with increasing sophistication.

Reading for Meaning in Informational Texts; Raising the Quality of Writing to Explain During this unit, fourth graders will continue to understand and summarize texts, describe relationships among and across ideas in text, and use text features and graphics to gain an overview of the informational text. Fourth graders will rely on text evidence to support their understanding. Students will deepen their ability to describe explicit and implicit relationships within expository texts organized by cause and effect, sequence, and comparison. Students will read and understand more complex informational texts (as compared to BOY reading levels), growing as self-directed, critical readers. Students will explain how various design techniques used in media influence the message (e.g., pacing, close-ups, sound effects), as it applies to this informational unit. In writing workshop, fourth graders will continue crafting essays with strong and well established central ideas, supported by facts, details, and explanations, and a concluding statement. Writers will strengthen their ability to link ideas through sentence to sentence connections across their essays, as the body of their essay become more developed and supportive of their central idea.

Drama & Elements of Literary Texts; Writing in the Test Genre Fourth graders will understand that fiction and drama share similar structures of plot, theme, etc. Readers will also understand that dramatic literature has particular structural elements of its own genre (such as dialogue, narrator, script, etc.) Students will blend their knowledge of fiction and drama as they read for deeper meaning. Sensory language TEKS spiral back into this unit as students identify the author's use of similes and metaphors to produce imagery; readers will make inferences and draw conclusions about an author's sensory language creates imagery in literary text and provide evidence from text to support their understanding (as connected to Figure 19D). In this unit, writers will make explicit connections between concepts they have learned this year about writing essays (TEKS) to writing expository essays successfully for STAAR.

Imagine and Express Your Ideas Fourth graders will review the skills of theme as they continue to sequence and summarize the lesson or message of fiction as its theme. In writing workshop, fourth graders will work through the writing process as they compose imaginative stories under the influence of studying imaginative story mentor texts.

Bringing it All Together: Analysis and Understanding in All Genres In preparation for the state reading assessment, students will return review and deepen their application, and independence of, reading strategies and grow in their targeted areas of need. (The reading TEKS in this unit are the TEKS assessed through STAAR reading.) Students will make connections between the reading strategies and skills they've learned across the year to taking reading assessments. Students will support their thinking with textual evidence and understand the importance of text dependent reading. Response to reading will include both oral and written response to text. Time will be spent teaching necessary test taking strategies in preparation for the upcoming state reading assessment exam.

Taking a Look at Author's Persuasive Language & Position During this unit, students will analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about persuasive texts and provide evidence from the text to support their analysis. Comprehension skills of focus for this unit include: establishing purposes for reading texts, asking literal, interpretive, and evaluative questions, and making inferences based on textual evidence to support understanding. Students will study how authors use language to present information with the purpose of influencing an audience. Students will connect their understandings from reading persuasive texts to writing persuasive essays and use research to support the position of their essays.

There are many components to a successful language arts program. My approach follows RRISD guidelines while focusing on many elements essential to your student's success. Here is a look at a typical day:

Reader’s Workshop

lesson
LLI/Interventions
teacher confers or small group instruction
Students’ independent reading
Share

Writer’s Workshop

lesson
Students’ independent writing/ teacher confers or small group instruction
Share

Balanced Literacy

Components are selected based on classroom data or students’ needs

Shared reading
Shared writing/grammar
Interactive writing
Interactive read-aloud
Grammar/word study*
Additional small group instruction

*may be individual, small group or whole group

Reading:

Writing:

Supporting your learner at home:

Discover ways to foster a love of writing in your 4th Grader with these fun activities.

BY SHIRA ACKERMAN, MA Retrieved from: Scholastic

Much of the 4th grade writing curriculum focuses on developing writing, specifically so that it has clarity and structure and uses reasons, facts and, details to support and strengthen students’ arguments. Fourth graders are taught to organize their writing, ensure that it has a flow, and group together related components. In addition, as students are taught to think more deeply about concepts, they are encouraged to write in deeper ways as well. They do this by going beyond simply stating the facts; they express ideas, make connections, and provide details and emotions when appropriate.

In order to build writing skills, your 4th grader:

Writes opinion pieces that express a point of view; have an introduction, a conclusion, reasons, and facts to support the opinion; and group together related ideas.
Writes informative/explanatory pieces that present information on a topic, use facts and details, group together related topics; provides introductions and conclusions in these pieces.
Writes narrative pieces that use specific details, descriptions, and dialogue to convey a real event; includes an introduction and conclusion in each piece.
Plans, revises, and edits his writing.
Uses technology to publish, research, and communicate with others under the proper guidance of an adult or teacher.
Types with beginning accuracy and ability (for example, types one page of text within one sitting).
Completes research projects by taking notes, organizing them, and presenting them; lists the texts and resources used.
Writes for both long (over weeks) and shorter (one sitting or a couple of days) periods of time.

Writing Activities

Ask Why: When your child expresses his opinion or states his ideas about something, ask him why he thinks that or how he knows it to be true. This will help him learn to support his opinion with reasons and/or facts. Do the same when you express your opinion or ideas about something.
Practice Typing: Encourage your child to practice his typing skills. Use typing games or make up your own games such as giving your child a word to spell and timing how fast he can type it.
Email with your Child: Set up an email account for your child and write emails describing your days to each other. Include details, conversations, thoughts, and emotions you had. This can be done in addition to generally encouraging (and supervising) your child’s use of technology — helping him use it for research, writing, and communicating with others. As always, be cautious of your child’s technology use by monitoring and supervising how much it is used and with whom he communicates.
Practice Note Taking: When you and your child go somewhere like a museum or on a trip, or even when you or child just talks about something interesting or of importance, pretend to be reporters and take notes. Both you and your child can take notes and then use those notes to later describe what you learned. You can even relay your “reports” as a newscaster would on a news show.

Discover ways to foster a love of reading in your 4th Grader with these fun activities.

BY SHIRA ACKERMAN, MA Retrieved from: Scholastic

Much of the 4th grade reading curriculum teaches students how to analyze the books they read. Rather than just understand the plot and information given in a text, students are encouraged to think about the messages in a text and how it relates to their own lives. They also compare texts to each other and make connections both within one text and across multiple texts. In short, 4th graders begin to learn how to “think” and talk about a text in order to find their deeper meanings and messages. This is done both with texts students read independently and texts read by the whole class or smaller groups of students. Teachers may often use a class read-aloud to show students strategies for thinking about and analyzing what they read, encouraging them to do this in their own reading. Students also do this as they write in more detail about the texts they read.

In order to build reading skills, your 4th grader:

Uses specific examples from the text to explain characters’ motivations, main events, central themes, or ideas about a text.
Uses the context of a text to determine the meaning of a word.
Understands and can explain the differences between narrative prose, drama, and poetry.
Identifies and refers to the different parts of poems and plays, such as verses, settings, and characters.
Interprets and connects information from illustrations, graphs, charts, or other sources related to the text.
Identifies, compares, and contrasts different perspectives from which texts are written. (For example, 1st and 3rd person).
Compares and contrasts the way different texts address the same issue, theme, or topic.
Makes connections between people, events, or important ideas in a text.
Uses previous knowledge to read unfamiliar multi-syllable words.
Reads grade-level texts with accurate comprehension, pacing, and expression.

Reading Activities

Read and Research Together: Read the same book as your child independently, together, or a combination of both. Talk about the books as you read them, reviewing main ideas and plots and expressing your opinions on the book. Then read an additional book or books on the same subject and compare and contrast how the books both dealt with the same issue. For example, read two fiction books about family, or two different texts about the same historical event or non-fiction topic.
Compare Perspectives: Read two texts, one that is first-hand and one written in third person about the same event. Talk with your child about the differences and why she thinks these differences exist. Or try this yourself! After sharing an event with your child, each of you can write about it from your own perspective. Or choose an event one of you experienced first-hand that both of you can write about individually. Talk about the differences between what you wrote to gain a better understanding of perspective.
Read magazine and newspaper articles, focusing on illustrations, graphs, or charts. Point out to your child what they show, ask her to help you interpret them, and discuss how they help explain or elaborate on the text.

Recommended Books for 4th Graders

Here are some book picks for your 4th grader:

Chasing Vermeer, by Blue Balliet: This is a great chapter book to read with your child. It is a mystery book about a brother and sister and incorporates adventure, art history and even secret codes!
The Story of Ruby Bridges, by Robert Coles: Although this is a picture book it is a very serious book which addresses the true story of a black girl attending an all-white school in New Orleans in 1960.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, by Judy Blume: The name of this book says it all. It is about a 4th grader, his classmates and their daily adventures.
Esperanza Rising, by Pam Munoz Ryan: This historical fiction novel tells the story of a girl who is forced to immigrate from Mexico to California during the depression.
It's Our World, Too!: Stories of Young People Who Are Making a Difference, by Phillip Hoose: This book tells true stories of children and young adults who took action and caused change in the world.

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