In Fourth Grade, students continue to build important reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.
Reading
Students identify and explain plot-based relationships and begin to analyze narrative elements of text. They continue to explore and understand the implied meaning of text as well as the impact a character has on a story. Fourth grade students also focus on how to read nonfiction text to gather information, making the shift from learning to read to reading to learn.
Writing and Spelling
Students learn to create organized pieces of writing that support the topics with reasons, facts, details, and other relevant information. Paragraphs are well formed and sequential, and students are able to complete the writing process through to a publishable piece. Students also learn to develop informative and explanatory writing that contains facts, definitions, quotations, and other important information related to the topic. They also learn to cite their information appropriately. While spelling work continues to focus on irregularly spelled words, fourth grade students also learn common suffixes and prefixes and begin to shift their focus to vocabulary acquisition.