It’s been a busy and productive first few weeks in fourth grade as we work to build a community of readers! Our focus centers on nurturing a love of reading for reading’s sake and learning to dive deep into our books. Working together, each class organized and set up their classroom libraries while also learning how to choose “just-right” books to read with comprehension and fluency. Our aim is to launch students back into being “nose-in-book” readers. By now, our fourth graders know how to use their reading logs and take responsibility for keeping track of the reading they do each day both in and outside the classroom. We are off to a fantastic start and our reading enthusiasm continues to build!
Fourth graders are ready to delve into complex texts and we are now “reading to learn” as opposed to years past where the focus was “learning to read.” Much of our 4th grade reading curriculum teaches students how to analyze the books they read. Rather than just understand the plot and information given in a text, we are thinking about the messages and how they relate to our own lives. Our conversations have been energetic and meaningful. We also compared texts to each other and made connections both within one text and across multiple texts. It is wonderful to see so much progress so soon in the school year.
All of our reading work is introduced in mini-lessons rich with discussion and modeling, then our students try out these new strategies with their own books. Turn-and-Talks and partner work often follow these lessons. Through our class discussions, read-alouds, partner-work and mentor texts, our 4th graders have already begun to learn how to think and talk about a text to find deeper meanings and messages. This is done both with texts students read independently and those read by the whole class or smaller groups of students. We often use a class read-aloud to show students strategies for thinking about and analyzing what they read, encouraging them to do this in their own reading. The knowledge students gain through working with mentor texts often helps strengthen their critical thinking skills. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was our first mentor text, and tons of fun as we introduced the genre of Realistic Fiction. Now Tiger Rising has us fully engrossed as we learn about our main characters in this beautifully written book about friendship, growth and trust. Together we model deep dives as we read, and explore author craft, consider motivations, symbols and so much more. After these first few weeks on the complexity of characters, we will move on to themes. We’ve had so much fun rallying enthusiasm for building big ideas that are grounded in the books we read in class.
Thinking deeply about characters helps us learn essential skills such as making inferences, building theories, and learning life lessons. We’ve been “walking in the shoes” of our book characters, and later we’ll step out of those shoes to reflect and grow big ideas about that character. In order to help students develop their skills at predicting, envisioning, and reading with fluency we teach them to “wear the shoes of the characters and inhabit the world of the book.” Scuba diving into our books helps us think deeply about a character’s personality quirks and habits, by considering what a character loves, the character’s complexities, and the way the secondary characters act towards and in reaction to the main characters. The goal for this portion of the unit is to have children’s theories built in complexity. They’ll go beyond simple character traits to study the complexity of characters, seeing complications and flaws, and they’ll build on their ideas about characters in order to also explore the themes those characters teach. They’ll trace a theme through different parts of the story and grow skills such as inference and interpretation.
Our 4th graders are eager to learn, and often groan when our reading block comes to an end for the day. They are able to listen well, appreciate other perspectives, and share ideas. This group of fourth graders is awesome and takes pride in their schoolwork. It is clear they are paying close attention as they work intensely to reach their reading goals! Bravo 4th graders!