During reading, the name of the game will be for our students to become more aware of good reading habits. Week by week and month by month more reading skills will be presented, modeled, worked with and talked about in hopes of encouraging our learners to be more aware while they are reading and pulling out more value from their pages. Some of these skills (and verbiage for the kids to put a name to) are: making connections while reading, being able to depict what are the most important parts of a chapter, summarizing ones reading, re-reading when an error is made, increasing fluency while reading and really tuning into ones accuracy. As these skills will be the main focus of our reading and reading goals, we will tease out these opportunities in a number of ways. At least three times a week (for about a half hour each session) our students have a read-to-self time when the students are practicing these skills and, often, working on assignments that add value to these reading traits. While the students are reading, I am workin with either individual kids or small groups to monitor and talk about their readings. Along with the read to self time, we also have a weekly class shared reading (through a website called NEWSela) that we can talk about a common text with, together. This time is very much student lead and a great opportunity for kids to learn from each other and promote the inner ability to talk, debate and share like ideas. Another time when we all have a common text to talk and share ideas with is every day after lunch. I host a read a loud each day and we take each page very slowly to talk about deeper reading attributes (why would an author write a phrase like this, does this interaction match this characters characteristics?, ...).
The writing unit for the next few months will be under the theme of opinion and persuasive essays. As our students have had some exposure of these topics in third grade, the evolution is now students will be will learn a variety of more sophisticated strategies for introducing their topics, and students will learn to provide reasons to support their opinions, as well as facts and details to elaborate on these reasons. One of the major shifts in opinion writing from third to fourth grade is in the area of logic and organization. There is a big step toward teaching some of this critical work now, in fourth grade, showing students different ways they can arrange their reasons and use varied evidence.