Elementary Curriculum for
Fourth Grade - Communication Arts

"Writing"

Content

• Retells a story from personal experience that makes sense and stays on topic by speaking, drawing or writing.  (R)
• Retells a story orally that makes sense and stays on topic by speaking, drawing or writing. (R)
• Communicates ideas that makes sense and stays on topic by speaking, drawing or writing.  (R)
• Talks about a self-selected topic or from a teacher prompt.  (R)
• Writes about a self-selected topic or from a teacher prompt.  (M)
• Recognizes and develops main idea.  (D)
• Provides enough details (minimum of three) to support the main idea.  (D)
• Shows awareness of audience by presenting ideas in an interesting manner to hold the reader’s attention.  (M)
• Responds to literature using personal experience and opinion.  (D)
• Learns and uses a variety of pre-writing techniques.  (D)
• Learns and uses a variety of revision techniques.  (D)

Style

• Speaks with own personality showing.  (M)
• Develops awareness of author’s voice and personality, word choice and interesting sentences.  (D)
• Writes with clear and engaging voice that reflects the student’s personality, feeling and personal thoughts.  (D)
• Writes a complete sentence.  (M)
• Uses descriptive words.  (D)
• Writes using sentence variety.  (D)
• Writes with an awareness of the audience.  (D)
• Writes a variety of genre including friendly letter, informational pieces, business letter, etc.  (D)

Organization

• Expresses a single thought.  (R)
• Stays on topic when speaking, drawing and/or writing. (R)
• Tells or retells a story using story grammar with correct sequence of events. (R)
• Integrates beginning, middle and end to communicate a sense of wholeness.  (M)
• Writes three connected thoughts focusing writing on one main idea. (R)
• Provides details and examples to support main idea.  (M)
• Writes a paragraph with topic sentence, three supporting details and a concluding sentence.  (D)
• Writes two or more paragraphs on one topic or main idea.  (D)
• Uses single transition words such as first, next, finally, etc. to move the reader through the text.  (D)

Conventions

• On final drafts, uses conventional spelling for age-appropriate words, with resources.  (D)
• Writes a complete sentence with a capital at the beginning and punctuation at the end.  (M)
• Uses capitals for proper nouns.  (M)
• Knows how to use margins and how to indent for paragraphs.  (D)
• Proofreads and edits surface errors to effectively communicate.  (D)
• Uses quotation marks for dialogue and commas in the correct places.  (I)
• Learns to recognize and use parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.  (D)
• Learns to recognize parts of a sentence.  (I)