📚 4th grade English Language Arts: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🔎Reading Detectives

   Reading short original stories and articles, then finding the main idea and key details, making inferences from clues, working out word meanings and choosing the best summary.

2. 📑Text Features

   Using the parts of a nonfiction book to find information: reading a table of contents and index, knowing what glossaries, captions, labels and timelines are for, and choosing headings.

3. 🎨Figurative Language

   Spotting similes, metaphors, personification, onomatopoeia and alliteration (plus hyperbole at the stretch level), and explaining what figurative phrases really mean.

4. 👀Point of View

   Telling first-person stories (I, me, we) from third-person stories (he, she, they), finding pronoun clues, and noticing when dialogue uses “I” in a third-person story.

5. 🧩Parts of Speech

   Naming the job each word does in a sentence, with a focus on Grade 4's pronouns, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions. Easier levels stick to nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns.

6. ✍️Super Sentences

   Joining sentences with and, but, or and so; spotting and fixing fragments and run-ons; and choosing verbs that agree with the subject and match the tense.

7. 🧱Word Builders

   Using word parts to work out meanings: prefixes like re- and mis-, suffixes like -able and -ment, finding the base word, and (at the stretch level) roots such as port and tele.

8. 👂Sound-Alikes

   Choosing between words that sound alike (there/their/they're, to/too/two, its/it's) and using context to tell which meaning of a word like “bark” or “bow” is meant.

9. 📝Paragraph Power

   Choosing topic and concluding sentences, finding the sentence that doesn't belong, using transition words, identifying cause and effect, and putting sentences in order.

10. ⚙️Grammar Gears

    Choosing who, which, that and whose, using have, has and had with the right verb form, telling questions from commands, and using my, your, their, this and these.

11. 🔍Media and Sources

    Children practice naming the target audience and purpose of a message, spotting techniques like close-ups and “hurry” words, telling facts from opinions, searching with keywords and judging whether a source is reliable.

12. ✏️Spelling Rules

    Children practice US spelling rules for adding endings (doubling, dropping e, changing y to i), plurals and common tricky words.

13. 👀Firsthand or Secondhand?

    Children practice telling firsthand accounts (diaries, letters, interviews) from secondhand ones (textbooks, reports, biographies) and what each kind shows best.

14. 🔎Clues in Texts

    Understanding hyperlinks, bold and italic type, labels and captions, telling who is narrating, spotting personification, and tracing causes and effects.

15. 🎤Listen, Speak & Read Aloud

    Good listening and speaking habits (taking turns, asking questions, speaking clearly) and reading aloud with pauses at punctuation, stress on key words and a voice that rises or falls with the meaning.

16. 🗣️Listening & Talking Together

    Practices listening for key ideas, taking turns, asking open-ended questions, giving reasons and using rich words and linking words in conversation.

17. ✨Revise & Polish

    Practices adding sensory details, choosing stronger words, revising to make writing clearer, using feedback and presenting final work neatly with words and images.

18. 🎭Poems and Plays

    Your child names the parts of poems and plays (verse, stanza, rhythm, meter, cast, scene, dialogue, stage directions) and explains how they differ from stories.

19. ⚖️Arguments, Evidence and Responses

    Your child picks strong claims, reasons and evidence, sees how authors support claims, answers questions with evidence from a text, and chooses creative responses such as a poem, play or artwork.

20. 📚Genres and Connections

    Your child names genres (myth, legend, folktale, tall tale, historical and science fiction, biography, opinion piece) from their features and connects texts to other texts, cultural perspectives, eras and their own lives.