Grade 4 ELA SOL Standards

The student will develop effective oral communication and collaboration skills to build a community of learners that process, understand, and interpret content together.

Communication, Listening, and Collaboration

Participate in a range of sustained collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade four topics and texts. This includes:

Listening actively and speaking using agreed-upon discussion rules.

Respectfully building on others’ ideas and clearly expressing their own.

Asking and answering specific questions to clarify concepts, share, or follow up on information, make connections, and confirm new understanding(s).

Using evidence, examples, or details to support opinions and conclusions.

Actively engaging throughout the collaboration

Speaking and Presentation of Ideas

Report orally on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner. This includes:

Using descriptive details and appropriate facts to support themes or central ideas.

Speaking audibly with appropriate pacing, prosody, and voice level.

Using language (formal or informal) and style as appropriate to the audience, topic, or purpose.

Encouraging audience participation through planned interactions (e.g., questioning, discussion, gathered responses, and movement).

Integrating Multimodal Literacies

Select, organize, and create engaging presentations that include multimedia components and visual displays.

Strategically use two or more interdependent modes of communication to convey the intended message and enhance the development of main ideas or themes.

Examining Media Messages

Differentiate between auditory, visual, and written media messages (e.g., videos, podcasts, print advertisements) and their purposes (to explain, to inform, to persuade).

Compare and contrast how ideas and topics are depicted (e.g., animation, famous images and words, music and sound, photo-editing) in a variety of media and formats.

The student will build knowledge and comprehension skills from reading a range of challenging, content-rich texts. This includes fluently reading and gathering evidence from grade-level complex texts, reading widely on topics to gain purposeful knowledge and vocabulary, and using reading strategies when comprehension breaks down.

Read a variety of grade-level complex texts with accuracy, automaticity, appropriate rate, and meaningful expression in successive readings to support comprehension. Monitor while reading to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, as necessary (Reading Fluency, K-12).

Proficiently read and comprehend a variety of literary and informational texts that exhibit complexity at the lower range of the grades 4-5 band (See the Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis charts for determining complexity in the Appendix.) (Text Complexity, 2-12).

When responding to texts through discussion and/or writing, draw several pieces of evidence from grade-level complex texts to support claims, conclusions, and inferences, including quoting or paraphrasing from texts accurately and tracing where relevant evidence is located (Textual Evidence, K-12).

Regularly engage in reading a series of conceptually related texts organized around topics of study to build knowledge and vocabulary (These texts should be at a range of complexity levels so students can read the texts independently, with peers, or with modest support.). Use this background knowledge as context for new learning (Deep Reading on Topics to Build Knowledge and Vocabulary K-12).

Use reading strategies as needed to aid and monitor comprehension when encountering challenging sections of text. These sense-making strategies attend to common organizational text structures, summarizing, asking questions of the text, and others (Reading Strategies 3-12).

See Kindergarten for standards that address Print Concepts.

See Kindergarten through grade two for standards that address Phonological and Phonemic Awareness.

Phonics and Word Analysis: The student will apply grade level phonics and word analysis skills to decode (read) unfamiliar words in grade level text.

Use knowledge of syllabication and syllable types to decode and encode words.

Use knowledge of morphology (suffixes, prefixes, root/base) to decode words.

Read grade-level high-frequency words, including decodable and irregular words, with automaticity and accuracy.

The student will print legibly in manuscript and cursive while applying grade level word knowledge to spell words correctly.

Handwriting

Maintain legible printing.

Maintain legible cursive.

Sign his/her first and last name.

Spelling

Use combined knowledge of all letter-sound correspondences, syllabication patterns, and morphology (e.g., roots and affixes) to spell accurately.

Use phoneme/grapheme (sound/symbol) correspondences to decode (read) and encode (spell) grade-level high-frequency words with automaticity and accuracy.

The student will use the conventions of Standard English when speaking and writing, differentiating between contexts that call for formal English and situations where informal discourse is more appropriate.

Grammar

Produce, expand, and rearrange simple and compound sentences, including prepositional phrases, when speaking and writing.

Use coordinating (e.g., and, but), subordinating (e.g., although, because) conjunctions to join words and phrases in a sentence.

Use adjectives to compare and describe noun or noun phrases with specificity when speaking and writing.

Use modal words (e.g., can, may, must) to convey various conditions when speaking and writing.

Use standard subject-verb agreement when speaking and writing.

Use standard noun-pronoun agreement when speaking and writing.

Mechanics

Use commas in series, dates, addresses, and letters in writing.

Use commas and quotation marks to indicate dialogue in writing.

Use apostrophes to form contractions and to show possession in writing.

Use conventional spelling for high-frequency and other studied words and grade level word analysis knowledge.

Consult reference materials to check and correct spelling.

The student will conduct research and read a series of conceptually related texts on selected topics to build knowledge on grade-four content and texts, solve problems, and support cross-curricular learning.

Evaluation and Synthesis of Information

Construct and formulate questions about a topic.

Identify search terms to locate information on the topic and gather relevant information from various print and digital sources.

Organize and synthesize information from the print and digital resources determining the relevance and reliability of the information gathered.

Develop notes that include important concept, summaries, and identification of information sources.

Organize and share information orally, in writing, or through visual display.

Avoid plagiarism and give proper credit by providing citations whenever using another person’s media, facts, ideas, graphics, music, and direct quotations.

The student will use textual evidence to demonstrate comprehension and build knowledge from grade-level complex informational texts read.

Key Ideas and Confirming Details

Summarize the main idea of multi-paragraph texts and the specific paragraphs within them, explaining how key details support the main ideas.

Summarize events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in historical, scientific, or technical texts, including what happened and why.

Distinguish between fact and opinion and explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support opinions within texts.

Craft and Style

Explain how authors select an organizational pattern (e.g., cause/effect, comparison/contrast, problem/solution) using transitional words and phrases to support their purpose and a reader’s understanding of the text.

Apply knowledge of text features and search tools in multiple print and digital sources to locate and categorize information efficiently and gain meaning.

Explain the author’s purpose for writing, including what the author wants to answer, explain, or describe based on the connections between particular sentences and paragraphs.

Integration of Concepts

Use prior (experience) and background (content) knowledge as context for new learning.

Compare and contrast multiple accounts of the same event or topic and describe the differences in focus and the information provided.

Describe the relationships between a series of historical events, scientific concepts, or steps in technical procedures using words that pertain to comparison, sequence, or cause and effect.

The student will use textual evidence to demonstrate comprehension and build knowledge from a variety of grade-level complex literary texts read to include fantasy, humor, poetry, realistic fiction, historical fiction, biography, autobiography, and folklore/tall tales, with a focus on poetry, realistic fiction and historical fiction.

Key Ideas and Plot Details

Summarize the theme of stories, dramas, or poetry, including the thematic topic (e.g., courage, loyalty, family) and how characters respond to challenges.

Describe the central conflict and explain the resolution using an understanding of text structure and events from the plot as evidence.

Analyze characters in-depth, drawing on specific details from the text, including their words, actions, or a character’s thoughts.

Craft and Style

Determine how an author uses language (dialogue, sensory language, and dialect), characters, and settings to advance the plot.

Identify the characteristics of different genres of literary texts (e.g., drama, poems, stories) and refer to the structural elements of each.

Identify the narrator of a story and the speaker of a poem.

Differentiate between first-and third-person point of view.

Integration of Concepts

Set a purpose for reading by activating prior (experience) and background (content) knowledge.

Compare and contrast details in paired literary and informational nonfiction texts including their treatment of similar themes, topics, and patterns of events.

Explain the overall structure of stories, poems, and plays and how each successive part builds on earlier sections.

The student will systematically build vocabulary and word knowledge based on gradefour content and texts.

Vocabulary Development and Word Analysis

Develop general academic language and content specific vocabulary by listening to, reading, and discussing a variety of texts relevant to a grade four topic or subject area.

Discuss meanings of complex words and phrases acquired through conversations and literature.

Determine the meaning of complex words using frequently occurring root words and inflectional affixes (e.g. -s, -ing, -ed).

Use the context of a sentence to apply knowledge of homophones.

Apply knowledge of morphology, synonyms, and antonyms to determine the meaning of complex words.

Develop breadth of vocabulary knowledge by listening to and reading high quality, complex text.

Distinguish shades of meaning among verbs and adjectives.

Use strategies to infer word meanings.

Use glossaries,beginning dictionaries, and thesauruses, both print and digital, to determine or clarify the meaning of words and phrases.

Use newly learned words and phrases in discussions and speaking activities.

The student will compose various works for diverse audiences and purposes, linked to grade four content and texts.

Modes and Purposes for Writing

Recognize different forms of writing (narrative, expository, and persuasive) have distinctive patterns of organization to support their purpose.

Write personal or fictional narratives that are logically organized around a central problem or experience.

Write expository texts to examine a topic that develops the focus with facts, details, or other information and uses linking words to connect ideas.

Write persuasive pieces on topics or texts that express a clear opinion supported by facts, details, and reasons.

Write in response to text(s) read (including summaries, reflections and descriptions) to demonstrate thinking with details, examples, and other evidence from the text, using linking words to connect ideas.

Organization and Composition

Engage in writing as a process to compose well-developed paragraphs. This includes:

Providing an introduction that includes a clear topic sentence that connects to the central idea.

Developing, selecting, and organizing ideas relevant to the topic, purpose, and genre using precise language and topic-specific words and phrases, descriptive details, and sensory language.

Using transition words and prepositional phrases to vary sentence structure and link sentences.

Providing a concluding statement or section.

Usage and Mechanics

With guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by revising for quality of ideas, organization, sentence fluency, and word choice.

Self-and peer-edit the writing for capitalization, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, paragraphing, and Standard English (See Language Usage for grade level expectations).

Communication and Multimodal Literacies

Developing Skilled Readers and Building Reading Stamina

Foundations for Reading

Foundations for Writing

Language Usage

Research

Reading Informational Text

Reading Literary Text

Reading and Vocabulary

Writing