Grade 4 • Language Arts • Writing

Grade 4 Language Arts

Writing

Your child will write for various audiences addressing a variety of purposes: to inform or explain, to persuade, and to express personal ideas. They will control sentence structure, word choice, and the conventions of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The Being a Writer program is designed to help students build these writing skills. Throughout the program students hear and discuss examples of good writing and use it as a model to draft, revise, and publish their own writing. The program also helps the class become a community of writers in which everyone feels welcome.

Fourth Grade Writing Units

The Writing Community
The Writing Process
Personal Narrative
Fiction
Expository Nonfiction
Functional Writing
Opinion Writing
Poetry
Revisiting the Writing Community

Writing Tips

Encourage your child to write often.
Provide an area for writing with materials and resources (pencils, pens, different kinds of paper, eraser).
Assist your child in planning and organizing ideas before beginning to write. Then help your child refer to the plan when writing. Offer suggestions about the ideas, details, and organization of the writing before correcting punctuation, spelling, and capitalization.
Assist your child when writing to include relevant information, details, and descriptive words.
Allow your child to take risks on a rough draft. Be your child’s partner for changing and correcting his or her writing.
Encourage your child to write thank you notes, invitations, letters to others, lists of things to do, and items to take on a trip.
Have spelling resources for your child to use at home (personal spelling journal, children’s dictionary).
Encourage your child to apply spelling strategies and patterns he or she has learned.

Writing Samples

Writing Expectations

Ways to Help your Fourth Grade Writer at Home

Ask Why: When your child expresses an opinion or states ideas about something, ask why he or she thinks that or how he or she knows it to be true. This will help your child learn to support an opinion with reasons and/or facts. Do the same when you express your opinion or ideas about something.
Practice Typing: Encourage your child to practice typing. Use typing games or make up your own games, such as giving your child a word to spell and timing how fast he or she can type it.
Email with your Child: Set up an email account for your child and write emails to each other describing your days to each other. Include details, conversations, thoughts and emotions you had. This can be done in addition to generally encouraging (and supervising) your child’s use of technology -- helping him or her use it for research, writing, and communicating with others. As always, be cautious of your child’s technology use by monitoring and supervising how much it is used and with whom he or she communicates.
Practice Note Taking: When you and your child go somewhere like a museum or on a trip, or even when you are talking about something interesting or important, pretend to be reporters and take notes. Use those notes later to describe what you learned. You can even relay your “reports” as a newscaster would on a news show.

Source from http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/collection/what-to-expect-grade/guide-to-4th-grade#4 Links to an external site.

Grade 4 • Language Arts • Writing