Book Worms

Language Arts

Wayland Union Schools utilizes Bookworms Reading and Writing as the basis of our Language Arts program. We are excited to share the list of books your child will be reading this year as part of our 4th grade Bookworms Reading and Writing program. Bookworms is a research-based curriculum that builds strong reading skills, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, and writing through engaging, high-quality literature.

Your child will read books during two main parts of their ELA block:

✅ Shared Reading – books students read together with the teacher to build reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies.

✅ ELA – chapter books read aloud by the teacher to build listening comprehension, vocabulary, and writing connections.

Students will also participate in a Differentiated Instruction Block to receive diagnostically-driven, Science of Reading-aligned instruction targeting foundational reading skills.

Below are the texts your child will read this year:

Shared Reading Texts

• A Strong Right Arm: The Story of Mamie “Peanut” Johnson (Green)

• Love, Amalia (Ada and Zubizarretta)

• Blood on the River: James Town, 1607 (Carbone)

• Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George? (Fritz)

• Tangerine (Bloor)

• My Life as a Book (Tashjian)

• Starry River of the Sky (Lin)

• The Amazing Life of Benjamin Franklin (Giblin)

ELA (Read-Aloud) Texts

• Earthquakes: All about Earth’s crust, colliding plates, tsunamis, and more! (Simon)

• Go Straight to eh Source: Super Smart Information Strategies (Fontichiaro)

• Roanoke: The Lost Colony: An Unsolved Mystery from History (Yolen and Stemple)

• Worst of Friends: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the True Story of an American Feud (Jurmain)

• My Life in Dog Years (Paulsen)

• Shaking Things Up: 14 Young Women Who Changed the World (Hood)

• Hatchet (Paulsen)

• Alabama Moon (Key)

• A Vocabulary Disaster (Frasier)

• Freedom on the Menu:: The Greensboro Sit-Ins (Weatherford)

• The Moon Book (Gibbons)

• Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean: Remembering Chinese Scientist Pu Zhelong’s Work for Sustainable Farming (Schmalzer)

• Auntie Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic (Lo)

These books will spark rich conversations and writing activities to deepen your child’s learning. If you would like to borrow any of these texts to read at home with your child, please let their teacher know.

Reading at Home

Each student is encouraged to read at least 20 minutes each night within a good fit book. This year I will not be sending home a log to keep track of minutes or pages  read. Within class students will be setting weekly reading goals.  Students  should be practicing their strategies at home in order to meet their weekly goals. Their goal sheets are allowed to travel to and from school.