Language Arts
Writing, Grammar, and Mechanics:
Writing will be formally taught, modeled and practiced during language arts time. The fourth grade curriculum relies primarily on Lucy Calkins' Units of Study for Teaching Writing (2006). The following is a tentative schedule of writing genres addressed this year
Quarter 1: "Launching the Writing Workshop"
First Personal Narrative - Lucy Calkins
Summary Writing
Quarter 2: "Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing"
Second Personal Narrative - Lucy Calkins
Friendly Letter
Quarter 3: "Breathing Life into Essays" - Lucy Calkins
Descriptive Writing
Quarter 4: Poetry Unit and a Research project
This well-developed program offers students a chance to really understand what good writing pieces look like. The program offers a variety of strategies good writers use, as we look and dissect professional, quality works known as "mentor text." Students truly become authors as they are carefully and methodically guided through the writing process by their teacher.
All students will use the writing process which includes: brainstorming/prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing.
With our model for teaching writing, students spend most of their time in the drafting and revising process.
The 6+1 Traits of writing model is another way that will be used to assess and teach writing. This model focuses on 6 qualities seen in outstanding written works. The seventh quality relates to the presentation of the written piece.
The six traits are:
- Ideas: The content or main theme. Can be looked at as the heart of the message.
- Organization: The internal structure of writing.
- Voice: The personal voice the author brings to the written piece. This gives a sense of a real person speaking.
- Word Choice: The use of precise, colorful and rich words to communicate.
- Sentence Fluency: The flow of sentences within the written piece that allows for a rhythm or cadence.
- Conventions: Mechanical correctness, including spelling and grammar.
The types of writing fourth graders will experience are personal narrative, expository, descriptive, narrative, persuasive, friendly letter, poetry, and summaries.
Students will also be working in the content areas (math, science, social studies) as they produce various types of writing and written response.
Additional Grammar Topics Taught Throughout the School Year:
Included in our Open Court Series, students will learn weekly language arts skills which include, but are not limited to:
- Identification and utilization of parts of speech including nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions
- Proper sentence structure and use and conventions of the English language
- Identification of subjects, predicates, fragments, subject/verb agreement and types of sentences
- Use of proper capitalization (in sentences, proper nouns, and titles)
- Use of proper punctuation (end punctuation, commas, quotation marks, apostrophe, colon and parentheses)
- Using a dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus, newspaper, atlas, almanac, and computer to gain information
- Using cursive writing with frequency, speed, and legibility
