The teacher will introduce students to websites about famous North Carolinians who have made contributions in our local communities and regions over time.  Higher-level students will work in small groups of 3 students, and they will work collaboratively in those small groups to pick 10 diverse historical figures of NC who have made contributions.  Then they will discuss and research these individuals to rank them according to amount of impact that their contributions had on our communities and state.  Students will need to justify their rankings which will require critical thinking and collaboration.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 4th Grade English Language Arts.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 4th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning.  

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 4th Grade English Language Arts. 

Help students explore an important moment of environmental activism in North Carolina with Save Our Sand Dunes by Hannah Bunn West and with Ann-Cabell Baum. This complementary learning guide to the book is designed to help educators guide young readers in discovering how Carolista Baum rallied a community and advocated for local and state leaders to preserve Jockey's Ridge.

Per the ReadWriteThink website: In this collaborative inquiry unit, the real gold is the inquiry skills and content area knowledge that students develop. The class works in small groups, each focusing on one aspect of the same big topic, such as the Gold Rush. After skimming related texts, the class brainstorms people, places and things associated with the topic and develops a list of five or six main subtopics. Students then work in small groups to research one of the subtopics, practicing specific research skills as they work. Finally, students choose an activity, such as an oral report, trivia game, or newspaper, to teach what they have learned to the rest of the class. Group accountability and individual responsibility are built in to this lesson process. While this unit uses the Gold Rush as an example, any event or geographical area could be substituted.

After the teacher has read books and internet articles to students regarding key historical events that occurred in NC and in their own area of the state and that have affected the local community, region, and state, higher level students will be asked to research more deeply these  events and collaboratively create a timeline of these events (in NC). This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

This lesson plan is a PBL (problem based learning) project. The students first took a survey to grab their attention, which informed them of their sleeping habits. Then the students began researching the question, "what factors are needed in order to get a good night's sleep?". The students will read a Time for Kids article, as well as research other articles, to discover new information about the topic. Based on what they learned, they will create an informative Piktochart that will be presented in class, displayed at the school fair, and hung around the school. Their final projects will ultimately help other students to achieve better sleeping habits!

In this lesson, students will use thematically related texts, organized from least to most complex, to gather a word bank of supporting details and content vocabulary about a concept. Then they use these words as a basis for writing acrostic poems, which support organization of information around a central idea, as the lines of an acrostic poem are held together by the topic or main idea spelled vertically.

Travel through The Blue Ridge Mountains using a variety of media with your students and experience the fall foliage of North Carolina. This document has links to images, a movie in MP4 format, and a 360 photo that can be copied and could be used to put together a virtual tour in Thinglink to share with your students.   Images of the original Thinglink are also included to make it easier to recreate.

Our PBL project is about zoo habitats! A guest speaker, from the Indianapolis Zoo, is coming to our classroom to give the students an idea about how the zoo works and how the animals live. In preparation for their trip to the zoo, the students will do some research on different animals and their habitats that will see on their visit. After their trip, the students will prepare a presentation on the zoo habitats compared to their habitats in the wild. After their presentation, the students are going to make a book including what they learned and any improvements they have for the zoo. We will send that book to our guest speaker.