4th

Field Experience: Supporting Independent Reading, Choice and Stamina

Helping students learn to choose books and develop stamina are important to developing independent readers. Ruth Ayres designed a field experience with opportunities to see minilessons, small group instruction, team meetings and a share session that support independence in readers.

Using 9/11 Research to Build Community and Writing Process

Katherine Sokolowski gives space for students to research and share their learning about 9/11 in order to build a community of writers, as well as nourish the research and writing process.

Books That Sustain the Linguistic Lives of Multilingual Learners

We need more bilingual books! Stella Villalba explains why these books are essential and provides a booklist to help sustain the linguistic lives of multilingual learners.

Talking Through Characters

Melanie Meehan shares activities that help students talk about their characters before writing about them in a realistic fiction unit.

The Shades of Sadness: Character Feelings and Traits

Melissa Quimby is disappointed with the way her students expressed depth of character traits and feelings. By building on their strengths, Melissa creates a tool for students to use and adapt as they learn to be more specific and intentional about describing characters.

Say Cheese: Sharing Photos to Increase Family and Student Engagement

Most teachers have, at some point, taken a picture of their class or a particular student and shared that photo with a family, but what if teachers became more intentional about taking and sending pictures? Tiffany Abbott Fuller gives practical ideas for using photos to increase family engagement.

Unlocking Student Thinking: The Power of Problem Posing in Story Problem Contexts

Choice Numeracy | Problem posing is a strategy that involves students creating mathematical problems to solve or reworking given problems to change them in some way. Mallory Messenger shows how this strategy allows students to explore and test their current thinking. Download the Problem Posing with Problem Stems Recording Sheet to get started in your classroom.

Lifting the Quality of Peer Response

Tony Keefer discovers that his fourth-grade students need focused instruction and support to strengthen their peer conferring skills. Tony shares tips and two video examples from his classroom.

The Influence of the Classroom Library

Heather Fisher writes a bold article addressing the many questions educators are facing about their values and beliefs when it comes to our classroom libraries in this time of a heavy emphasis on phonics instruction and decodable books.

Rhyme and Reflect: Fostering Fluency Through Poetry

Joanne Emery recommends using poetry to help children practice their oral expression. She offers many poetry books and strategies for fluency practice.

What Is ORF Anyway?

Dana Murphy reminds us that teaching students to read faster is often a surface-level answer to a much deeper question. Reading is a complex process; if you’re wondering what to do about oral reading fluency scores, then Dana offers powerful encouragement.

Connecting with Students at Home

Julie Johnson learns some important lessons about connecting with students remotely, and few of them are about technology.

Forming Groups Using a Planner

Dana Murphy explains how her small-group planner is an essential tool for organizing groups in her fourth-grade classroom.

Discussion and Summary As a Prelude to Fiction Writing

Helping Kids Lead Every Day: Changing Who “Owns” Small Groups in the Classroom

Tammy Mulligan knows the most productive and engaging discussions to build reading comprehension are not monopolized by the teacher. She creates a structure to support students to engage in deeper work with each other in small groups. This is the first part of a three-part series.

Teaching Rereading During Class Read Alouds

Aimee Buckner teaches her 4th graders the power of rereading using the mentor text Goblins in the Castle by Bruce Coville.

Revising Titles Minilesson

In this minilesson from Franki Sibberson’s grades 3 and 4 classroom, Franki takes students through the process of selecting and revising titles. She uses the poem “Confessions of a Reader” by Carol Wilcox as a mentor text.

Overcoming: Helping Students Process Covid Feelings

Julie Cox reminds us that for many students, the loneliness and fear of COVID years clings like smoke, and they don’t always have the language to talk about it. While we have worked hard at helping students reclaim content knowledge, we must also help them express and process feelings they might not know how to recognize.

Quick Take: Special Library Shelves

Christy Rush-Levine shares a few special shelves in her classroom library.

Instructional Routines That Promote Agency for Multilingual Learners

Cultivating agency is a matter of building small, intentional moves that ask students to be part of the learning process. Stella Villalba offers three ways educators can support the growth of multilingual learners in all learning spaces. 

Using Skype in the Classroom

Katherine Sokolowski has suggestions for Skype use in classrooms, covering everything from student etiquette to special events.

A Just-Right Lesson for Just-Right Books

Melissa Styger finds she needs to make changes to her just-right book lesson to meet the needs of her third-grade students.

Organizing Materials to Support Literacy Learning (Classroom Design Series Part 3)

Ann Marie Corgill shares how she organizes materials for literacy learning in the third installment of her design series.

Intentional Consolidation and Closure

Mallory Messenger emphasizes the importance of providing time for students to share their learning and offers different formats for a share session. Mallory guides us in making decisions so that share time consolidates and uplifts the learning.