First Quarter Reading and Writing Curriculum Overview

Reading Unit 1:Getting to Know Yourself as a Reader

Overview of Unit:  In this unit, students will learn how to author their reading lives by becoming a classroom community of readers.  Students will also obtain the identity of being a reader by setting goals, creating a life that revolves around shared books, and helping students develop a sense of personal agency in their lives.

Priority Standards for unit:

• RL.4.1; RI.4.1: Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• RF.4.3: Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.

• RF.4.4: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
• SL.4.1: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.
• SL.4.4: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.

Writing Unit 1: Getting to Know Ourselves as Writers

Overview of Unit:  In this unit, students will learn how to author their writing lives by becoming a classroom community of writers.  Students will generate many seed ideas and draft a short, narrative piece to start the year and build stamina around writing. Additionally grammar, language and conventions standards will be taught to set up this expectation in all writing across the year.

Priority Standards for unit:

• W.4.3: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
• W.4.4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

• L.4.1: Demonstrate command of conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
• L.4.2: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
• SL.4.1: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.

Reading Unit 2:Following Characters into Meaning

Overview of Unit:  Readers focus on developing ideas about characters and their motivations. This unit pays attention to student stamina, choosing books, and setting goals as readers.

In this unit readers will be focusing on strengthening their abilities to make interpretations of texts. This is a unit which teaches students to read with inference and interpretation, developing text‐based theories about characters, supporting those theories with evidence from the text, and viewing characters and their motivations through a different lens. Students will consider big-life issues that relate to many stories and determine how these issues affect the message of the stories they are reading. Your students have already done some of this thinking in prior years, and you’ll want to help them transfer these skills even as they learn new ones.

In Topic 1 (Bend I) of the unit readers will read to envision, predict and infer about characters. During these lessons students will move forward asking themselves how they can get lost in the world of the story and while doing that get to know the characters so well that they get lost in their world.

In Topic 2 (Bend II) of the unit readers will build theories about characters. During these lessons students will focus on reading to develop precise, defendable, grounded ideas about characters within and across books.

In Topic 3 (Bend III) of this unit readers will work to study characters and build interpretations. Students will focus on finding recurring images, objects and details and demonstrate how they support or contribute to the overall theme of the text.

Priority Standards for unit:

• RL.4.1 Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• RL.4.2 Determine theme of a story, drama or poem from details in the text; summarize the text
• RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g. character’s thoughts, words or actions)
• SL.4.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.

Writing Unit 2: The Arc of a Story

Overview of Unit:  In this unit, students will be crafting realistic fiction stories as a form of narrative writing.  This is the first time in their elementary education that narrative writing isn’t about a personal narrative, so while you will lean on that experience to guide the teaching of this unit, students will be thinking about narrative writing in a whole new way.

Topic 1 (Bend 1): Creating and Developing Stories and Characters that Feel Real

The goal of this bend is for students to collect many story ideas and trying a few of them out to see if they can become possible stories.  They will practice storytelling to a partner in order develop rich language to embed within the story, understanding the power of voice.  They will then work to develop strong characters who can carry the story.

Topic 2 (Bend 2): Revising and Drafting with an Eye toward Believability

In this bend students will create story arcs that plan out their story in two to three scenes.  Using this tool they will begin to draft their story in a story book to give them an authentic feel.

Topic 3 (Bend 3): Preparing for Publication with an Audience in Mind

In this bend, students will prepare their piece for an audience through focused drafting, revising, and editing.  Students will pay great attention to the power of place, the character’s struggle, how the problem is dealt with, and a quality resolution.  Because of this, revision work will happen early on while many are still drafting.  However, due to the length of the piece in conjunction with the craft and structural elements they have to think through, early revision will be necessary so they can be doing it early on.

Topic 4 (Bend 4): Preparing for Publication with an Audience in Mind

In this bend, students conceive, develop, plan and carry out their own independent fiction projects, taking what they have learned in the previous three bends and applying it to a new story on their own.

Priority Standards for unit:

• W.4.3: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
• W.4.4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• L.4.3:  Use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading or listening.