Writing - Robbinsville Public School District

Fourth Grade
INDICATORS:
• Writers develop a realistic fiction story based on everyday moments in their lives.
• Writers develop characters with wants, realistic and consistent external and internal features, who face and
overcome challenges.
• Writers ground scenes with realistic setting and dialogue.
• Writers develop secondary characters that interact with the main character.
• Writers structure their story using a story mountain, developing a rising action, turning point, and resolution.
• Writers rehearse and revise their writing throughout the writing process – especially before and while drafting –
rather than wait until the end of the writing process.
• Writers reread and revise their writing through various lenses.
• Writers make reading-writing connections with mentor texts, using mentors to shape their own realistic fiction
writing (idea generation, internal and external characteristics, setting, dialogue, the arc of the story, beginnings,
and endings).
• Writers use mentor texts to shape dialogue, make paragraphing decisions, and accurately use punctuation
including quotation marks, commas, question marks, periods, exclamation points, and ellipses.
Common State Standards for English Language Arts
Reading Standards Literature:
RL 4.3
Reading Standards Foundational Skills
RF 4.3, 4
Writing Standards K-5
W 4.3, 4, 5, 6, 8,10
Speaking and Listening
SL 4.1
Language Standards
L 4.1, 2, 3, 4, 6
21 st Century Skills:
Creativity and Innovation Critical thinking and Problem Solving
Communication
Collaboration
Writing Process
COLLECTING CHOOSING DEVELOPING DRAFTING REVISING EDITING
PUBLISHING
AND
CELEBRATING
POSSIBLE MENTOR TEXTS
Mentor Texts:
The Wall by Eve Bunting
The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson
Oliver Button is a Sissy by Tomie DePaola
“Seeing, Really Seeing” from Chicken Soup for the
Children’s Soul
The Three Billy Goats Gruff by Paul Galdone. (1981).
Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse. (1999)
Pet Show! by Ezra Jack Keats. (2001).
The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting. (1989).
“John and the Snake” in Childtimes: A Three
Generation Memoir by Eloise Greenfield and Lessie
Jones Little. (1993).
A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams. (1984).
TEACHER RESOURCE TEXTS
Writing Fiction: Big Dreams, Tall Ambitions Grades 3-5 by
Calkins and M. Colleen Cruz, book four from Units of Study
for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5. (2006).
Text Forms and Features: A Resource for Intentional
Teaching by Margaret Mooney. (2001).
Past Perfect, Present Tense: New and Collected Stories by
Richard Peck. (2004).
Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency: Thinking,
Talking, and Writing About Reading, K-8 by Irene C. Fountas
and Gay Su Pinnell. (2006).
Robbinsville School District page 48