Reading
What are we learning?
April/May
As we are nearing the end of the school year, we are wrapping up our main units of study! We will be going into a biography mini-unit where students will be able to choose an influential figure to study and apply all they know about analyzing characters, deciphering informational texts, and questioning how history influenced their actions. In a cumulative project, your fourth graders will be creating a timeline and report about their specific figure!
Also, during the beginning of May we will be starting our CAASPP testing in English Language Arts, which encompasses both reading and writing skills.
March
This month, we will be diving back into narrative text, exploring Historical Fiction! We have already been familiarizing ourselves with different historical periods through analyzing picture books set in the Gold Rush, Civil War, and World War II. As the students pick up historical fiction book clubs, they will continue synthesizing how settings and plotlines work within a timeline to not only interpret a story, but learn about history and the perspectives of others as well.
February
During this month we will be finishing our unit of nonfiction study by transitioning from reading about the Gold Rush to reading about Rocks! This topic aligns with our science unit and will continue to build students' skills of summarizing, synthesizing, and and recognizing text structures.
January
With the start of the new year, we are starting our third unit of study: the Gold Rush! Students will continue reading nonfiction texts, becoming historians, while researching important subtopics from the California Gold Rush. During this unit, we will be focusing on perspective in the texts we are reading and finding relationships in and between texts. We will also continue working on skills such as summarizing, comparing and contrasting, and synthesizing information across texts. As students become expert Gold Rush historians, we will be staging a great debate where they will act as hopeful 49'ers and share and debate their evidence based opinions about which route to California is best!
December
We are finishing up our nonfiction reading unit on extreme weather. We will be focusing on the skill of comparing and contrasting information from two sources or topics. We will also revisit summarization and identifying the main idea and important details of a text.
November
This month, we will continue to grow our nonfiction reading skills by researching different types of extreme weather. By the end of our unit, students will have become experts on two different extreme weather topics (such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes). We will present our findings to the class using the FlipGrid App.
October
Students are finishing up Unit 1: Interpreting Characters: The Heart of the Story by reading fiction stories. Students are analyzing characters and finding text evidence to support their thinking.
We will take a Unit 1 Post-Assessment the first week of October. Important skills demonstrated in this test will be the ability to infer about and analyze characters and determine a theme of a text.
Other things that students will work on during October will be...
- Answering questions about characters and story details using specific text evidence
- Comparing and contrasting two different stories
- Reading and studying new topics with nonfiction text
For the second half of the month, we will begin Unit 2, which focuses on nonfiction reading in the science topic of extreme weather. Students will work on gleaning information from nonfiction texts by using text features and typical text structures.
August/September
Students will be introduced to the reading workshop. We will learn...
- Habits that independent readers use to make reading successful
- Strategies for reading accurately and with deep comprehension
- Working in partnerships to broaden understanding