English Language Arts Grade 4 [2011]

• Alliteration All Around
  In this lesson, students learn about alliteration from picture books by author / illustrator, Pamela Duncan Edwards. Using the books' illustrations for inspiration, students write original alliterative sentences and share them with the class. As the lesson continues, students practice using alliteration to create acrostic poems, alphabet books, number books, and tongue twisters.
• Balancing Three Branches at Once
  This page contains 4 EDSITEment lessons in which students use primary source documents to investigate of how the three branches of the American government can check each other.
• Bright Morning: Exploring Character Development
  In this lesson from ReadWriteThink, students explore characters in their reading, identifying traits and pointing to textual support. This lesson uses "Sing Down the Moon" by Scott O'Dell; however, any fictional text can be adapted to the lesson.
• Earth Verse: Using Science in Poetry
  This lesson is a great way to teach both scientific and English content to a class, although the teacher can easily choose another book and subject area. In this lesson, students listen to poems in the book Science Verse by Jon Scieszka.
• Escaping Slavery: Sweet Clara & the Freedom Quilt
  This lesson, from ReadWriteThink, uses the picture book "Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt" by Deborah Hopkinson and an interactive website to enhance students' understanding of the Underground Railroad and slavery. They will create a problems/solutions/events chart to help them understand the relationships between Clara's problems and how she solves them. Similar to Clara's map that shows the path north to freedom, students create their own map designing a key, a compass, and landmarks surrounding their home and school. Students will develop their reading comprehension skills and application of mapping skills.
• Examining Plot Conflict through a Comparison/Contrast Essay
  In this lesson, students explore picture books to identify the characteristics of four types of conflict: character vs. character, character vs. self, character vs. nature, and character vs. society.
• Fables and Trickster Tales Around the World
  This lesson plan from EDSITEment introduces students to folktales, such as fables and trickster tales, from around the world. Students become familiar with different folklore traditions and genres, as well as the process of the oral transmission of culture and history. This lesson plan comprises a series of activities that include reading, writing, and literary analysis. Also included is an internet research activity, as well as a list of links to related resources.
• Helpful Animals and Compassionate Humans in Folklore
  Students will learn to define a folktale, understand the characteristics of helpful animal folktales, explain the roles humans play in helpful animal stories (human in distress, compassionate hunter, seeker/companion), and the conditions for animal transformation.
• Integrating Literacy Into the Study of the Earth's Surface
  Science trade books are an invaluable tool for supporting science learning with literacy. This lesson introduces third through fifth grade students to the bodies of water on the Earth's surface, including ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans.
• It Came From Greek Mythology
  This page contains 6 EDSITEment lessons based around teaching Greek mythology. Students will study basic plots of three Greek myths and discuss three types of themes in Greek myths. They will also explore contemporary uses of terms from Greek mythology and analyze artistic and literary works based on or inspired by Greek myths.
• Literature Circles: Getting Started
  This lesson from ReadWriteThink explores Literature Circles, a great way to supplement a reading program in a literature-based classroom. Students create and answer comprehension questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine elements of literature.
• Peace Poems and Picasso Doves
  This lesson, from ReadWriteThink, supports third-grade students as they apply think-aloud strategies to reading, as well as to the composition of artwork and poetry. Activities include collaborative as well as individual work. Technology tools are integrated as students research symbols of peace and as they prewrite, compose, and publish their poetry.
• Playing with Prepositions Through Poetry
  In this lesson from ReadWriteThink, students have the opportunity to play with language, particularly prepositions, through the literature of Ruth Heller. Taking those experiences as a reader, they are asked to continue to play with the language in poetry.
• Poetry: A Feast to Form Fluent Readers
  In this lesson from ReadWriteThink, students examine elements of fluent reading through oral poetry performance. They use the Internet to identify a poem to prepare and perform for the class. The main objective of this lesson concerns improving fluency.
• Reading and Writing About Pollution to Understand Cause and Effect
  In this lesson, students access prior knowledge about water pollution before exploring the topic further using read-alouds. They then complete a sequencing graphic organizer using a story of a fish and its journey from the mountains to a polluted waterway. Finally, students' understanding of cause and effect is reinforced using a hands-on experiment, art project, and graphic organizer.
• Shape Poems: Writing Extraordinary Poems About Ordinary Objects
  Students will recognize the characteristics and format of a shape poem; compile a list of content area terms and sensory images (collaboratively as a class and also independently) that relate to a shape or object, as part of the process of brainstorming a word bank for their shape poem; apply spelling knowledge and strategies when brainstorming words for the word bank and writing and revising their shape poem.
• Teaching Point of View With Two Bad Ants
  This lesson provides students with the opportunity to use illustrations and text to develop an understanding of the point of view of the characters.
• Telling a Story Through Dance
  In this lesson plan students learn that dancing is one way to tell a story.
• Using Historical Fiction to Learn About the Civil War
  This lesson uses the book Meet Addy by Connie Porter to teach the characteristics of historical fiction, the making of inferences, the use of visualization, and Civil War history.
• Using Picture Books to Teach Characterization
  This ReadWriteThink lesson invites students to examine the craft of developing characters through focused experiences with pictures books. Through the careful analysis of character portrayal using the text and illustrations as cues, and online tools such as the ReadWriteThink Story Map, students have the opportunity to build bridges from their own experiences as readers to those skills needed as writers.
• What Makes Poetry? Exploring Line Breaks
  This lesson, from ReadWriteThink, engages children in exploring various poems and hypothesizing about why lines are broken where they are in poetry. Students then experiment with line breaks and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, appearance, and can substitute for punctuation in poetry.