English Language Arts

About this course

Fourth grade is the widest language arts year in this curriculum, and it adds several things your student has not met before. Fiction is split into two units, one on character and setting (traits, motivation, dynamic versus static characters, first and third person) and one on plot and theme (conflict, rising action, climax, resolution, theme versus topic). A full poetry unit covers rhyme scheme, simile, metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia, free verse, the Psalms as poetry, and writing an original poem. Nonfiction gets its own unit built around the four text structures and primary versus secondary sources. Writing is taught three times over as three separate genres, each carried from blank page to finished piece: narrative (characters, dialogue, show-don't-tell, strong openings and endings), informational (research, organization, text features), and persuasive (forming an opinion, supporting it, addressing counterarguments). Grammar is split into parts of speech and sentence structure, the latter including run-ons, fragments, and sentence combining. Two units are new this year: cursive handwriting, taught letter group by letter group with slant, x-height, and connection strokes, and media literacy, which teaches language bias, selection bias, omission bias, advertising, and evaluating digital versus print sources with discernment.

The course is 276 lessons across 19 units, the largest count of any grade here. Most instructional units hold 10 or 12 lessons of about 45 minutes. Three units are long-running weekly sequences: a 36-week spelling word list unit and a matching 36-week spelling quiz unit, plus a 36-week Christian Heroes reading unit. Spelling runs in pairs, a study lesson with twelve words in a table giving meaning and an example sentence plus a look-say-cover-write-check routine, then a quiz lesson later in the week where a button speaks the word aloud and your student types it into a sentence, so that part needs working audio. The themes run from short-vowel review through blends, silent letters, plurals, prefixes and suffixes, -ough and -augh, the schwa sound, Latin and Greek roots, and end at spelling bee challenge words. Every other lesson ends with the usual ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself.

The Christian Heroes unit is worth a word on its own. It is 36 biography readings, roughly the first half on Bible figures (Ruth, Joseph, Esther, Daniel, Hannah, Nehemiah, Deborah) and the second half on later Christians (William Tyndale, Corrie ten Boom, George Mueller, Hudson Taylor, Fanny Crosby, Eric Liddell, William Wilberforce, Clara Barton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer). These are substantial, dated, factual accounts rather than sketches, and a few of them tell plainly how the person died, including Tyndale at the stake and Jim Elliot and Bonhoeffer in the twentieth century. Nothing dwells on detail, but you may want to read those alongside a sensitive student. Coming in, your student should be reading multi-paragraph text independently and writing a solid paragraph. The lesson text is written directly to the student and is dense enough that most of the year can be done independently, with your help on the writing projects and cursive practice.

What the course covers

• Comprehension strategies: predicting, inferring, summarizing, determining importance
• Character, setting, plot structure, conflict, and theme
• Poetry: rhyme scheme, figurative language, free verse, and the Psalms
• Nonfiction text structures and primary versus secondary sources
• Parts of speech, run-ons, fragments, and sentence combining
• Narrative, informational, and persuasive writing, each start to finish
• Cursive handwriting and reading fluency
• Media literacy, bias, and advertising
• 36 Bible and Christian-history biography readings
• 36 weeks of spelling word lists paired with typed quizzes

What your student will be able to do

• Trace plot structure and state the theme of a story in one sentence
• Identify simile, metaphor, alliteration, and rhyme scheme in a poem
• Fix run-on sentences and fragments and combine short sentences well
• Draft, revise, and publish a narrative, a report, and a persuasive essay
• Write legibly in cursive with consistent slant and spacing
• Spot bias and missing information in an article or advertisement

Scope and sequence

All 19 units of English Language Arts for Grade 4, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 276 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 276 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.