I love 4th!

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I love 4th!
By ALI

I teach 4th grade and love it! This was my first year teaching 4th grade.

My kids like books by Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Gary Paulsen (Hatchet and Brian's Winter), Series of Unfortunate Events, Barbara Parks (Skinnybones),
Louis Sachar, and Jerry Spinelli.
I have guided reading groups. In my guided reading groups we focus more on non-fiction texts. I also do literature circles with fiction chapter books. They read a certain amount of chapters, have a few questions, and then get together with the group that's reading the same book and discuss them. Each person has a specific job within the group.

Literature circles tend to be more interest grouped, and guided reading is ability grouped. I decide on their guided reading groups by their DRA scores (Developmental Reading Assessment) from the end of 3rd grade. The students move and shift around from groups depending on their reading level.

My students have in-class guided reading assignments and literature circle assignments. They also have journal reading notebooks. A book I would highly recommend for you is "Guiding Readers and Writers Grades 4-6" by Fountas and Phinnell. An excellent guide! We do all writing assignments in class during Writer's Workshop.

For homework they are supposed to read 20 minutes a night (maybe one night they read 10 and another 30). They bring home guided reading and/or literature circle assignments if they don't get them done in school. They have math homework every week too.

There are many fun projects to do with reading. I also relate researching and research/report writing to reading. We may read a non-fiction book in guided reading, research the topic, and then write research/report papers. One example is one group read a book about the lives of 2 American Women Social Reformers. After reading, we came up with 5 questions we'd like to know about another social reformer. Each student picked a social reformer, and we researched them. They each wrote a research paper on their social reformer. Each question we asked was a paragraph. They also learned about plagarism, note taking, researching on the internet, and writing a bibliography.

4th grade is a great grade to teach! They are becoming more independent, but they are still little kids.

Good luck!