Reading and Writing Workshop

This year we will be using myView Literacy. You child will be delving into complex texts and see significance in details in four units. 

1. Interpreting Characters: The Heart of the Story: Students study the complexity of characters and explore themes while developing skills such as inference and interpretation.

2. Reading the Weather, Reading the World: Students form research teams to delve into topics about extreme weather and natural disasters while developing their skills in cross-text synthesis, practicing close reading, comparing and contrasting, and evaluating sources to determine credibility.

3. Reading History: The American Revolution: Students take on the challenge of researching history in the third unit. They will study multiple points of view, support a position with reasons and evidence, tackle complex texts, and learn strategies for using new domain-specific words.

4. Historical Fiction Clubs: Students practice reading analytically, synthesizing complicated narratives, comparing and contrasting themes, and incorporating nonfiction research into their reading.

Children entering fourth grade are right on the cusp of writing more academic texts. Students will produce writing such as thesis-driven persuasive essays, literary essays, and research reports in four units. 

1. The Arc of Story: Writing Realistic Fiction: Students learn that the lenses they bring to reading fiction can also be brought to writing fiction, as they develop believable characters with struggles and motivations and rich stories to tell. 

2. Boxes and Bullets: Personal and Persuasive Essays: Students learn the value of organization and form as they gather evidence to support and express an opinion on topics they know well.

3. Bringing History to Life: In this unit, students are ready to tackle historical research in which they collect evidence and use details to vividly describe people and events from long ago. 

4. The Literary Essay: Writing About Fiction: Students build on their learning of essay writing and apply it with increasing sophistication to a unit on literary essays—that is, writing about fiction.