Literacy

The English Language Arts are, loosely, reading, writing, speaking, listening, and, in general, communicating.

The Daily 5/CRAFT: Our language arts block will be based on the research of The Daily 5.  Students will spend time learning how to be efficient, independent readers.  Once they have practiced what these habits look like, students will be involved with either small group instruction with a teacher or literacy centers in 5 areas: Read to Yourself, Read to Someone, Work on Writing, Listen to Reading (from the Reading book and the Leveled Readers), and Spelling/Word Work.  We will build the CRAFT skills that mix together to make a skillful reader: Comprehension, Response to Text, Accuracy, Fluency, and Text Elements.

Handwriting: It is true that much of the world’s communication is typed.  Some may say that practicing handwriting is unnecessary.  Others indicate that the practice of handwriting has a relationship to ability with composition.  We practice cursive writing on a daily basis for homework.  Students are expected to neatly complete the lesson for the day.  Daily lessons are interconnected and often offer information beyond copying.  The skill of copying, often a struggle for fourth graders, is something that is practiced with our exercises as well.

INTERACTIVE lowercase handwriting help                 
INTERACTIVE uppercase handwriting help

Technology: Instructional technology plays a large role in much of what we do in our class, but especially in English Language Arts.  Students will have opportunities to use SMART Technologies, Microsoft Office applications, and Web 2.0 tools to accompany their learning activities.

Fluency: Students will be involved in various groups and partnerships for reading throughout the year.  Students will practice increasing their oral reading fluency (how well they can read aloud), as that has a correlation to other success as readers.  Throughout the year, all students will be assessed three times through the DIBELS benchmarking system.  Some students will be monitored via the DIBELS progress monitoring system every few weeks.  The yearly goal for a fourth grade student is, when given a brand new passage, to read with fluency at a rate of 120 words per minute.

Reading Counts!: Scholastic Reading Counts! is a computer-based program that allows students to show evidence of comprehension of their independent reading.  District 87 has a wide variety of tests for this program.  If a student is reading a book with the intention of taking an RC! test, the book should be in that student’s Lexile range when possible.  Exceptions are made for individual students.  Students take quarterly reading inventories to determine their Lexile range.  The hope is that their Lexile score will increase throughout the year.  Each time a student passes a RC! test, s/he earns points.  There are many incentives, school-wide and classroom, throughout the year for students who earn certain levels of points.

Sentence Patterns: We will be studying many different patterns in sentences from the most basic (noun-verb) to more complex (including phrases to further describe our thoughts).  Students will examine sentences written in certain patterns, create sentences with groups, and create their own sentences following the specific patterns that we study.

Discovery Assessment