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

This unit is focused on figurative language, covering common core standards in language, literature for reading, and speaking and listening with the final assessment.  It is designed to be used with a workshop model, where there is some form of opening for brief instruction, partner and/or independent work time, and a closing time for sharing within each lesson.

In this lesson, students overcome their fears by using a traditional poem to teach students about alliteration. After reading the book, A My Name Is... by Alice Lyne, students use a variety of print and online resources to brainstorm their own alliterative word lists. They then create a poetry link that uses the traditional poem they have read together as a framework for their own poems.

Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919), also known as L. Frank Baum, was an American author, best known for his children’s books. Baum is the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote 14 novels in the Oz series. In this excerpt from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends arrive at the Emerald City. As students read, they take notes on how the Great Oz is described to Dorothy and her friends.

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.

In this lesson, students begin by working in small groups to analyze differences and similarities among a selection of comics from a variety of subgenres. Based on their discussion, they determine what subgenres are represented and divide the comics accordingly. Students then analyze the professional comics' uses of conventions such as layout and page design. Finally, they create their own comics using an online tool.

In this lesson, sample cinquains are read aloud as a class, allowing students to familiarize themselves with the form. Students then write simple cinquain of their own as a follow-up to a subject they have been exploring in class. Although students can write about any subject, graphic organizers and other resources are available to support units on animals, community, fairy tales, healthy foods, picture books, and rainforest/habitats.

Students will use their knowledge of genres of literature to create posters for disply in the library or classroom to use as a reference.

Students are given a brief description of a rhyme scheme before being asked to determine the rhyme scheme on their own in this worksheet

In this activity, students read about the possible events of Betsy Ross’s creation of the first American flag from the perspective of a fellow seamstress. As studnets read, they take notes on the narrator’s perspective, and how her perspective impacts her feelings about the Revolutionary War.

In this lesson, The Jolly Postman is used as an authentic example to discuss letter writing as a genre. Students explore letters to the storybook characters delivered by The Jolly Postman. They then learn how to categorize their own examples of mail. The Jolly Postman uses well-known storybook characters, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, as recipients of letters. This children's storybook is therefore ideal for using as a review of these genres of literature and as a means of helping children begin to explore rhyme and a variety of writing styles. Several pieces of literature appropriate for use with this lesson are suggested.

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 activity, students read a fable by Aesop who was a storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE.

In this activity, students read a story and answer questions about the text. The resource contains guided reading and assessment questions.

This is an online exploration poetry lesson. Students will navigate through aninteractive PowerPoint presentation and complete different tasks while acquiring knowledge on the various aspects of poetry.

Students will read background information, a poem, idioms, vocabulary, definitions, sentences, a graphic organizer, and a prompt. Students will write what idioms mean, words to complete sentences, a main idea, and a story. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

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.

This activity asks students to imagine what it would be like to live as a worker, specifically as a child worker, in the U.S. Industrial Revolution—a time of great technological progress though often at the cost of workers’ rights. As students read, they take notes on the way the text is written—such as point of view, tone, and word choice—and how this narration effects the overall meaning.

Students will learn the difference between the genres, then work collaboratively to identify genres and subgenres. Lessons within the unit have a powerpoint introduction, group work, as well as homework.

The lesson plan will guide students while reading the novel "Love that Dog" by Sharon Creech. The discussion questions are perfect for literature circles. Provided is a summary of the book and more about the author. This resource is provided by Scholastic.