Reading strategies for 4th graders

Best 4th Grade Reading Comprehension Activities

Topic: English Language Arts,Reading Grades: 4th Grade:

Make it fun, make it interesting.

By the time students reach the fourth grade, they have mastered the basics of phonics and decoding and are starting to dig deeper into understanding what they’re reading. It’s a great time to introduce learning strategies that will help them be lifelong readers. Here are a dozen ways to boost fourth grade reading comprehension.

1. Color-code your thinking

Taking notes and highlighting reading passages with color can help students differentiate, retain, and transfer knowledge as well as pay attention to critical information for meaningful learning. Teach your students to use colors to highlight passages as they read to help them identify features such as main idea, details and vocabulary words. Or use different colors to mark different sections of a graphic organizer.

Learn more: Think, Grow, Giggle

2. Try think-alouds

Another way to improve fourth grade comprehension is through think-alouds. While reading a text to students, share the questions and answers that are going through your mind. For example, “How does the story make you feel?”

Learn more: The Balanced Literacy Diet

3. Watch a story-elements rap video

You know how they say setting learning to music helps improve retention? Well, with this story-elements rap video, kids will find themselves chanting the chorus long after they watch it. And if rap’s not your thing, check out this list of Our Favorite YouTube Videos for Teaching Story Elements.

4. Play a round of reading comprehension Jenga

Who doesn’t love a rousing game of Jenga? The careful strategy in picking just the right block … the rush of successfully pulling out a block … the loud crash of the whole tower tumbling down! This classroom version is not only a blast, it helps boost reading comprehension skills. Score a used Jenga set at a garage sale or thrift store, then download this huge collection of fiction and nonfiction reading comprehension questions from Elementary Assessments.

Learn more: Remedia Publications

5. Beef up vocabulary skills

The more words a student knows, the greater their access to complex reading passages. Practice vocabulary skills in a fun way with these 20 Meaningful Vocabulary Activities. Draw vocabulary Sketchnotes, play Vocabulary Jeopardy, join the Million Dollar Word Club, and more.

6. Practice using context clues

Image source: Crafting Connections

It is vitally important for all students to be able to use context clues to determine the definitions of unknown words. This poster and lesson plan from Crafting Connections will give your students the strategies they need to be a word detective.

7. Find creative ways to respond to reading

Image source: An Educator’s Life

Gone are the days of the dreaded, old-fashioned, stand-in-front-of-the-class and read your boring book report. How about making a mint-tin book report? Or a book report cake? Or a mobile made from a clothes hanger or a paper bag book report? These are just a few of the Creative Ways Kids Can Respond to Books we’ve rounded up to get your students excited about reading.

8. Learn about close-reading strategies

Image source: D Lu on Pinterest

Close reading is defined as “an intensive analysis of a text in order to come to terms with what it says, how it says it, and what it means.” And research shows that teaching students how to close-read helps them become better readers. The trick is spicing it up so that students apply close-reading skills without getting bored. Here are Innovative Teacher Ideas for Teaching Close Reading.

9. Create anchor charts together

From marking a text to visualizing to understanding a character’s journey, we’ve got the fourth grade reading comprehension anchor charts for you! Choose from dozens of colorful samples for you to build along with your students during direct instruction time.

10. Introduce figurative language

Image source: YourDictionary.com

Figurative language—things like metaphors, similes, and onomatopoeia—make reading more colorful and interesting. Understanding figurative language is a complex literacy skill that will stretch your students’ understanding. Center your lessons around these fantastic figurative language anchor charts.

11. Focus on theme

Image source: Upper Elementary Snapshots

To fully explore theme, students must be able to understand what they read and then extract ideas from the text. Here are essential tips for teaching theme in language arts.

12. Read between the lines

Learning to make inferences is a key literacy skill and something all good readers do. When students pause while they are reading to ask questions and make connections, it strengthens their comprehension. For more on this topic, visit Teaching With a Mountain View.

Looking for more ways to encourage fourth grade reading comprehension? Check out our list of 60 of the Best Books for 4th Grade.

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Tips And Tricks For Improving 4th Grade Reading Comprehension

In the 4th grade, your child is likely to learn much more advanced concepts than ever before. They are beginning to learn on their own in many ways and learning to think on their own. Much of their learning is likely to be taking place in the classroom.

However, the coronavirus has caused schools to closed. This disruption to the normal school year has caused many parents to turn to homeschool to supplement their children’s education at this time. Many important skills learned in school are now being taught by parents at home.

What is a 4th grade reading level?

By 4th grade, your child is learning many different ideas, concepts, and topics. Everything they are learning uses one essential tool: critical thinking. Before your child can learn to think critically, they need to learn to understand what they are reading.

Reading comprehension is being able to understand the ideas presented in a text that you have read. In 4th grade, your child is no longer “learning to read”, but “reading to learn”.

Your child’s reading level by now means they are able to:

Read a variety of different genres such as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.
Understand new materials and write about what they have read.
Answer questions about the materials.
Read materials and organize the information and ideas effectively.

What are the 5 reading comprehension strategies?

Reading comprehension relies on several strategies that can help your child understand their reading materials.

Activate background knowledge – Children understand reading materials better when they have a frame of prior knowledge to work with. Just asking your child “what do you know about…” can help them think about the topic before they begin reading.
Questioning – Before reading, also get your child to ask questions about the reading. Your child should have three questions in mind as they read: right now questions, analytical questions, and research questions. A “right now” question is figuring out what facts and information are being presented in the text. An “analytical” question is when your child needs to figure out “what is the author trying to tell me?”. A “research” question basically encourages your child to do their own research outside of the text.
Analyze text structure– In order to analyze text structure, your child needs to be able to identify the various ways text is presented such as cause and effect, chronologically, or listing. They should also be able to find the different parts of a text and know what they are used for such as headings and subheadings.
Visualization – Many teachers and researchers stress that reading comprehension also includes being able to visualize the text in some way. This might be by using graphic organizers such as mind maps or even just asking your child to draw what they think the story is about.
Summarizing – Summarizing is a great tool to use to make sure your child is able to identify the main ideas of a text. If they are able to find the main ideas presented in a text, they are most likely also already using the other four reading comprehension strategies.

How can I Improve Reading Comprehension for my Grade 4 Student?

Now that we know the strategies that make up effective reading comprehension, how can we help our 4th graders to practice and actually improve their reading comprehension? Here are some activities and tools you can use at home to help with improving 4th grade reading comprehension:

Read together – Reading together has several benefits for improving your child’s reading comprehension. It helps with creating a bond with your child as well as gives them a model for good reading habits. If you are reading together, you get a better sense of the materials they are reading and a sense of how their reading progress is going.
Use cookbooks – The best way to improve reading comprehension is to have fun! Kids love to help in the kitchen, so why not incorporate some reading practice into the activity? Have your child choose a recipe they would like to cook and as the two of you cook have them read the directions to you.
Find a good reading app – Technology is making reading practice much more fun and interactive. However, with the numerous reading apps out there it can be difficult to find the best one. Use an app like Readability that targets several reading skills at once. With Readability, your child is able to get instant feedback and error correction from the app. The app also provides you with progress reports, so you can track your child’s reading improvements.
Talk about their books – The simple act of talking about what your child is reading can have a big impact on their reading comprehension. A conversation about their reading helps them to activate background knowledge about the topic and think more critically about what they read.
Have a movie night – To help your child with visualization, have your child first read a book that has been turned into a film. Once they are done reading the book, you can watch the movie version together and talk about if the movie fits the visuals they created in their mind from reading the book.

Reading comprehension is an important reading skill that many 4th graders begin to master. However, some young readers might still be struggling with effective reading comprehension. Using these strategies and tools such as Readability makes reading improvement fun and interactive. These tips and tricks for improving 4th-grade reading comprehension can help your child get on track with their reading skills.

Effective strategies for working with text in the classroom at school

The ultimate goal of teaching Russian is practical literacy and language competence. The basis of the content of literature as an academic subject is reading and textual study of works of art.

Work with the text as the main didactic unit allows schoolchildren to combine the activities of developing practical skills of literate writing and speech development.

Every teacher dreams that all students come to the lesson prepared: they have completely read this or that work or paragraph. And not just read, but understood the meaning of the text read. During the final certification, the graduate must also understand the meaning of the read text. Whether it is a task to the text or the text itself.

Teachers working in grades 9 and 11 know that most mistakes are made due to misunderstanding of what is read, as well as when reading the assignment itself.

Teaching a child to read “correctly”, “effectively”, “productively” is an important task for a teacher. That is why the technology of productive reading (PRT), developed by Professor N. Svetlovskaya, acquires a leading role and contributes to the achievement of the results that are mentioned in the new standards.

The technology is universal and can be used in lessons of any cycle.

It is aimed at the formation of all universal educational activities: cognitive, communicative, regulatory, personal.

The technology of productive reading differs sharply from the traditional technology of transferring ready-made knowledge to a student. The teacher organizes the children's research work in such a way that they themselves "think" about solving the key problem of the lesson and can themselves explain how to act in new conditions. The teacher becomes a partner, a mentor, an observer.

The developed technology includes three stages of working with text, a three-stage process.

The goal of is the development of anticipation (the ability to guess, predict the content of the text). Task - to develop motivation for reading the text

1. Strategy "Forecast by headline".

Task: think about what can be discussed in the story of K.G. Paustovsky "Warm bread", in the work of P.P. Bazhov "Mistress of the Copper Mountain", etc.

– Try to predict the content by the first line of the story…Remember the name of the story….Does the content of the story match the title?

Give examples of such discrepancies.

Associative bush (circle, row). Today we will read and discuss the topic… What associations do you have about the stated topic?

2. Strategy "Brainstorm" ("Basket of ideas").

Task: answer the questions before reading the text (fairy tales "Warm bread") - What do you know about K. G. Paustovsky? What do you think the story will be about? Who can be the main character? What event in the story can be described.

3. Strategy "Image of the text".

Task: check your assumptions. Based on the words taken from the text, try to make a short plot story. The title of the story is given.

4. Strategy "Battery of questions".

Task: make up questions to the text according to the title, according to the illustrations.

5. Glossary strategy.

Task: look at the list of words and mark those that can be related to the text. When you finish reading the text, go back to these words and look at their meaning and the use of words used in the text.

6. "Competing with the writer" strategy.

Task: try to predict the content of the book by looking at the illustrations. One student offers his version, the rest complete it.

7. Strategy "True and False Statements".

8. Strategy I know, I want to know, I found out.

Stage 2 - stage of text activity.

The purpose of is to understand the text and create its reader's interpretation, summarizing part of the read text, asking questions of a general nature, making assumptions about the further development of the plot and the role of characters in the composition of the text, etc. ).

The main task of is to ensure the full perception of the text. The main strategies at the stage of text activity are dialogue with the author, commented reading.

1. Strategy "Reading in a circle". The text is read in turn (each "circle member" reads a paragraph). After this, a stop follows: everyone asks questions to the read passage. If the question cannot be answered (it does not correspond to the text), then the question is considered incorrect. * All correct questions can be recorded.

2. Silent reading with questions strategy.

3. Strategy “Reading to yourself with notes. (Insert)" . Marginal notes: + - knew; - - new; ? - interesting; V is unclear. Others are possible: B - question; O - answer; Z - I know; N - new; And - interesting; X - I want to know; C - ask; U to clarify.

4. Strategy "Reading with stops". Reading the text with stops, during which tasks are given in the form of questions: some are aimed at checking understanding, others - at predicting the content of the next passage.

5. "Pose a problem - offer a solution" strategy. Remember what problems the heroes of the work face (the problem is formulated and written down in an oval). Next, the children can name several problems, students are divided into groups and offer all kinds of solutions to problems.

6. Strategy "Creating a question plan". The student carries out a semantic grouping of the text, highlights the strong points, divides the text into semantic parts and titles each part with a key question…….

Stage 3 – stage of post-text (post-text) activity.

The purpose of is to correct the reader's interpretation in accordance with the author's meaning.

The main task of is to provide in-depth perception and understanding of the text, to raise a question to the text as a whole, followed by a conversation, the result of which should be an understanding of the author's meaning. Re-addressing the title, illustrations, performing creative tasks.

2. Question tree strategy Crown – what? where? when? Barrel - why? How? Could you? Roots - how to relate the text to life? With current events? What is the author trying to show?

3. Strategy "Bloom's Cube" (Benjamin Bloom is a famous American teacher, author of many pedagogical strategies = technician).

The beginnings of the questions are written on the faces of the cube: “Why?”, “Explain”, “Name”, “Suggest”, “Think up”, “Share”. The teacher or student rolls the die.

It is necessary to formulate a question to the educational material on the side on which the cube fell.

The “Name” question is aimed at the level of reproduction, i.e. at the simple reproduction of knowledge.

Question "Why" - the student in this case must find cause-and-effect relationships, describe the processes occurring with a certain object or phenomenon.

“Explain ” question – student uses concepts and principles in new situations.

All of the above strategies involve serious work with the text, its deep analysis and understanding, the organization of independent cognitive activity of students on educational material. socially moral experience and makes you think, knowing the world around you.

Technology Advantage:

1. Applicable in the lessons of any cycle and at any level of education.

2. Focused on personal development.

3. Develops the ability to predict the results of reading.

4. Promotes understanding of the text in the lesson.

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International studies on the quality of education

and are conducted by international organizations: the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

International Comparative Research allows you to identify and compare the status and changes in education systems in different countries and evaluate the effectiveness of strategic decisions in the field of education.

The comparison is not speculative based on the study of various sources of literature, not on the basis of a comparison of the results of prestigious international Olympiads for the elite, but on the results of studies conducted on representative samples of students from different countries using the same toolkit, which is created taking into account international priorities in education.

Russia has been participating in international studies since 1990.

PISA: Program for International Student Assessment. The purpose of the study is to assess the ability of students to use the knowledge and experience acquired at school for a wide range of life tasks in various areas of human activity, communication and social relations.
TIMSS: Third International Mathematics and Science Study. The main purpose of the study is to compare the quality of mathematics and science education in primary and secondary schools
PIRLS: a study of the quality of reading and understanding of the text (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). The study is conducted to compare the level and quality of reading and understanding of the text by primary school students around the world, as well as to identify and interpret differences in national education systems in order to improve the process of learning to read.
ICILS: International Computer and Information Literacy Study. The purpose of the study is to assess the preparedness of students for study, work and life in the information age, to study the levels of computer and information literacy of 8th grade students in the participating countries, to analyze the identified differences, to promote education in this area at the national and international levels.
ICCS: International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. The study provides information on the conceptual understanding and competencies in the field of civic education, on the predispositions and attitudes towards it among young people.

International comparative studies have been actively developed in our country and, along with the state final certification, all-Russian verification works and national studies of the quality of education, form the Unified System for Assessing the Quality of Education (ESOKO) in the Russian Federation.

For more information about international comparative studies, please visit the website of the Federal Institute for Educational Quality Assessment

Preparing for PISA-2022: mathematical literacy

On April 4, 2022, the PISA international study of the quality of education will begin in the Chelyabinsk region. Mathematical literacy, which was the focus of the study in 2003 and 2012, will be the object of special attention in the next cycle of the study.

Preparing for PISA-2022: components of functional literacy

From April 4 to May 15, students from the Chelyabinsk region will take part in the international study of the quality of education PISA.

Functional literacy in the international PISA study

In the spring of 2022, students from seven schools in the Chelyabinsk region will take part in the main phase of the PISA study.

Chelyabinsk region will take part in the international study of the quality of education PISA

From April 4 to May 20, 2022, students of educational institutions of the Chelyabinsk region will take part in the main stage of the PISA study.

Students of the Chelyabinsk region will take part in the PISA study

From October 11 to November 5, 2021, students of educational institutions of the Chelyabinsk region will take part in the all-Russian assessment according to the PISA model.

Pupils of the 4th grade of the region will take part in an international study of the quality of education

In April 2021, fourth-graders from the Chelyabinsk region will participate in the international study of reading quality and text comprehension (PIRLS-2021).

Russia has improved its performance in the TIMSS international study of education quality, entering the top six

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Rosobrnadzor summed up the first results of education quality studies regions of the Russian Federation in 2019-2020 according to the PISA model

The Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science, during a press conference held on November 27, summed up the first results of studies of the quality of education in the regions of Russia according to the PISA model, which took place in 2019-2020.