4th Grade Language Arts
Setting Up For Reading
Unit 1
Unit 1: Setting Up For Reading
In this unit, we'll cover many basic skills to know when reading. Make sure to take notes when you need to and watch all videos to get a full understanding in each topic!
Inferences
Making inferences involves using personal experience/background knowledge/schema, along with the information in the text, to make assumptions about what is NOT written. Inferential thinking is often referred to as “reading between and beyond the lines”. Ever heard that phrase before?
To learn more about inferences, watch the video to the left, it covers a lot of basics in understanding how to infer.
What Do I Do With Inferences?
Inferences can be used in many ways, including when you need to use textual evidence. It is important to know how to refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. You can also read the evidence given to you in a story and then infer what happened as a conclusion.
Check out this awesome video explaining how to cite textual evidence!
Summarizing
The purpose of summarizing a story, a passage, an article, or whatever you are reading is to show you understand the main idea and details of what you are reading! When you finish a good book and want to explain the summary of it to your friends or even your teacher, you must learn this skill. Summarizing can also be used when stating textual evidence and you need to be able to summarize the main idea in order for the evidence to make sense. In other words, summarizing is very key when reading.
Normally, a summary will include:
The 5 W's: Who, What, When, Where, Why
The main idea and key details
Any key words and information that stands out
What Is The Main Idea?
The main idea helps the reader understand what the story or the text is about. It is the most important part of the text or story.
What Are The Supporting Details?
The supporting details are the facts or examples that tell or give more information about the main idea.
Watch this video to learn more about connections!
Connections
When you read a book or a short story, have you ever considered connecting it to other pieces of literature and comparing the similarities within the two? This is a very important skill to have when reading and becomes a very big part of language arts in the future!
When learning about this unit, be on the look out for similarities and differences in themes, topics, and patterns of events among culturally diverse stories, myths, and traditional literature.