Name: The English Series: 4th Grade English Workbook
SKU: 617035517b4999578a8ee061
Price: 39.99 USD
Availability: InStock

About this resource

What's inside this resource

The English Series: 4th Grade English Workbook is a 56-page download. It covers a range of English skills for 4th grade students. There are 3 sections in this workbook: Text structure and organization, expressing and developing ideas, and interacting with literature. Within each section, there are texts for students to read. Then there are worksheets for students to complete to enhance their grammar skills.

What's included

Teachers' Notes describing the three sections and confirming the book is one of seven in The English Series (page 4)
Section One - Text Structure and Organization (pages 5-18): text types, Recount 1 and 2, the narrative "The Long Night" with an analysis sheet, Information Report 1 and 2, Procedure 1 and 2, a persuasive text with two analysis sheets, and a Letter To The Editor connector exercise
Section Two - Expressing and Developing Ideas (pages 19-34): noun groups, modifiers, adverb groups, prepositional phrases, providing details in texts, homophones, which homophone, word families and suffixes, prefixes, affixes roundup, and four pages on direct and indirect speech
A teachers' notes page for the direct and indirect speech unit, with the original comic strip to compare against students' versions (page 30)
Section Three - Interacting with Literature (pages 35-53): "The Thief", a Korean folk tale retold by Lisa Craig across three pages, then sheets on folk-tale structure, plot, character analysis, conflicts and morals, and language features
A poetry strand inside section three: a vocabulary organiser on the Australian bush, then "Where The Pelican Builds Her Nest" (Mary Hannay Foott, 1881), "The Australian Sunrise" and "Cossack, WA", each with an analysis sheet
A five-page Answers section at the back covering the section exercises, including sample answers where the response is open (pages 54-58)
A contents page listing every activity by name and page, and a copyright notice granting the purchasing institution photocopying rights (pages 2-3)

Resource types: Workbooks, Worksheets & Printables

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Identify recount, procedure, persuasive, information report and narrative texts from short extracts and name what distinguishes each
Use time connectors and linking connectors accurately, and explain what each connector signals about the sentence that follows
Build and analyse noun groups, adverb groups and prepositional phrases, labelling pointers, counters, describers, classifiers and the head noun
Choose correctly between homophone pairs, and use prefixes, suffixes and the final-consonant-doubling rule to build and decode words
Analyse a folk tale for plot stages, character, conflict and moral, and explain what makes it a folk tale rather than a fairy tale
Read three narrative poems and account for their structure, imagery and vocabulary

Teaching tips

The three sections stand alone: text types, language features and literature can be taught in any order, though several sheets refer back to a text printed a page or two earlier
Pages come in pairs - a text page followed by its activity page - so print them together or the activity sheet will not make sense on its own
The Information Report 2 sheet is peer-review practice: students critique a fictional classmate's draft on Powerful Owls, marking what he did well before suggesting improvements, then compare notes with a partner
The direct-and-indirect-speech unit has a teachers' notes page that holds the original comic strip back until students have made their own, which is worth reading before you start page 31
The Answers section gives sample responses as well as fixed ones, which is useful on the open questions where more than one answer works
Australian references run through the stimulus texts - woylies, quolls, the Powerful Owl, the Australian bush poems - and repay a quick look at a map or a picture before reading

Skills covered

Text-type identification - students read five short extracts and sort them as recount, procedure, persuasive, information report or narrative.
Cohesion through connectors - a birthday recount is rebuilt using a fixed list of time connectors, and a Letter To The Editor is completed by choosing between and, but, so, yet and in order to.
Grammatical structure - students label the parts of a noun group across pointer, counter, describer, classifier and head noun, then work through adverb groups and prepositional phrases.
Word building - homophone pairs such as hare/hair, toad/towed and weak/week are chosen in context, and prefixes, suffixes and the final-consonant-doubling rule are applied to build new words.
Literary analysis - students map the plot of "The Thief" through opening, events, climax, falling action and resolution, and compare folk-tale features with fairy-tale features on a rubric.
Poetry reading - three narrative poems are analysed after a vocabulary-gathering organiser on the Australian bush prepares the imagery.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

Which country's English does the workbook use?

American spelling and units throughout - color, organized, favorite, inches and pounds - over stimulus texts that are largely Australian: woylies and quolls at a zoo, an information report on the Powerful Owl, and three Australian bush poems. The publisher, Ready-Ed Publications, prints in Australia and the text has been Americanised for this edition.

How do the reading texts and the activity sheets fit together?

In pairs. A full-page text is printed first and the activity that works on it follows - the narrative "The Long Night" on page 9 with its analysis sheet on page 10, the persuasive text on page 15 with two sheets after it, and the three-page folk tale before six analysis sheets. Several activity pages say directly which page to read first.

What is the folk tale in section three?

"The Thief", a Korean tale retold by the workbook's author, about a masterful thief who is finally caught and then, from the King's court, hands round a peach pit that only a person who has never lied, stolen, cheated or hurt anyone may plant. Six activity sheets work on its structure, plot, characters, conflict, moral and language.