This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 4th grade ELA content.

This unit combines nonfiction reading, biographies, Henry Ford, and Michigan history into one unit. It covers many informational reading standards and Michigan social studies standards all together.

This unit engages students in a variety of different reading standards through face to face and online components. In this unit, students will practice many skills to aid them in reading and understanding nonfiction texts.

In this lesson, traditional stories of the Native peoples (i.e., narrative text) introduce students to the study of animals in Alaska (i.e., expository text). Students use the Internet to listen to a Yu'pik tale told by John Active, a Native American living in Alaska. They also use online resources to find facts about animals in Alaska. Students compare and contrast the two types of text in terms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrative stories provide students with a context to begin studying a content area topic; this lesson emphasizes the integration of curriculum.

This lesson is for Grades 4 - 5 on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.  Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

Students examine books, selected from the American Library Association Challenged/Banned Books list, and write persuasive pieces expressing their views about what should be done with the books at their school.

This is an example of a personalized learning path using the Nearpod system. Students complete a pre-assessment to discover the skills they should continue to practice as well as an extension activity for student who already show mastery.

Students will identify why and how Feynman started to look at the world through the eyes of a scientist. Students will both learn how memoirs can be as deeply revealing as fiction and how to unpack the meaning of a first person narrative.

Students will read through a nonfiction text picking out key ideas and details. Students will create their own note taking sheet using boxes and bullets based on teacher modeling. This lesson was developed by Sara Kull as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.            

Teacher will introduce nonfiction using any book on Australia and Oceania. Teaching Point: Readers summarize chunks of text by pausing and saying to themselves "What is the one big thing that this text is teaching, and how do other details support this idea?" This lesson was developed by Tina Deal as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

In Unit 1, students begin to build background knowledge about the women’s suffrage movement and the role that Susan B. Anthony played in it. Students will read a variety of informational texts as well as primary source documents. In Lessons 1 and 2, students are introduced to the topic through examining a timeline on the history of voting in America and an excerpt of a speech by Susan B. Anthony. (They will revisit the speech throughout the module.) Throughout the first half of this unit, students will read and summarize several informational texts about Susan B. Anthony. Students will also learn to use glossaries, context clues, and deconstructing parts of words as strategies for understanding unfamiliar academic and domain-specific words. This is followed by a mid-unit assessment of RI.4.2 and RI.4.4. Students then continue learning about Susan B. Anthony’s role in the suffrage movement, comparing firsthand and secondhand accounts of key events in the history of voting in America. The end of unit assessment focuses on RI.4.2 and RI.4.6: Students compare firsthand and secondhand accounts of a modern-era historical event (the inauguration of Barack Obama).

In this lesson,students work to transform narrative-style letters into poetic format and they are forced to think carefully about where to end each line. Students begin by discussing letters they have written and working with an online tool as an introduction to letter poems. As a group, students look at a letter form of “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams and add line breaks to turn it into a poem. They then compare the poem they created with the original, discussing why the poet made the line break choices he did. Next, students
work in small groups to rewrite another letter as a poem and then compare the various groups’ results with the original poem. Students then use a Venn diagram to compare letters and poems. Finally, they compose their own letter poems.

In this lesson using Ben’s Dream, a picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, students highlight ten major landmarks of the world: the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Parthenon, the Sphinx, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and Mount Rushmore. After reading and discussing Ben’s Dream, students identify the landmarks shown in the book and examine photographs of them. Working in small groups, students select one landmark to research. Using their research skills, students locate these famous landmarks, conduct further research on them, publish their findings using an online tool, and share that information with the class.

This is a multi-day culminating activity based on unit 3 of the 4th grade Wonders curriculum. Students will work in groups to research a given landmark in Beaufort County, NC. After researching the landmark, they will record their data in the Google Slides presentation attached in the lesson for each landmark. After recording their research, students will use the DASH Robots to move throughout the Beaufort County, NC map, stopping at their destination. Groups will then use the DASH Robots to record audio of themselves describing the landmark. A rubric accompanies this activity so teachers have guidelines on how to assess student work.

Students differentiate between observations and hypotheses after reading an article about pterosaurs. They then consider how challenging and further testing hypotheses is part of the nature of science.

Students listen to a read aloud of a children's science book and watch a short video on how plankton migrate in the ocean. Students write a poem describing their feelings about what they heard and saw.

This resource contains resources that will help students understand that writers use different structures to organize nonfiction texts and that readers need to know a variety of reading strategies appropriate for the text and their purpose for reading such text. Reading strategies to use before, during, and after reading are shared as well as graphic organizers.

This lesson is for grades 4-5 on literacy. At Home Learning Lessons are a partnership between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, PBS North Carolina, and the William and Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. Each lesson contains a video instructional lesson, a PDF lesson plan with a transcript, and a PDF file of extension activities.

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.