February, March and April

Writing Workshop

Starting in February, the fourth grade has changed gears from persuasive writing to writing about reading.  Students will be exposed to and will practice answering many different types of short response and essay questions involving theme, character change, beginning / middle / end feelings, similarities and differences as well as some non-fiction informational texts. 

Although the essays and responses have different topics, one thing remains the same:  students must come up with an idea to answer each question and provide details and or text evidence to support their answers.

Towards the beginning of March, the students will be working on reading paired passages and responding to questions that relate to the paired texts. Along with short responses to paired passage texts, the students will also be writing extended responses. These extended responses will be determined by the amount of bullets the writing task includes. For example, if the task has two bullets then that should signal to the student that the extended response should be organized in two paragraphs. If there are three bullets then the student will organize and write a three paragraph response.

The paired passages are as follows:
"Brainy Birds"
"Too Many Zucchinis"
"Lindbergh"
"Hattie Big Sky"
"Call of the Wild"