Reading

Buhler Fourth Grade Reading
[|This site] has several links to websites with lesson plans and activities on the various text structures. Let's start with Cause and Effect and discuss ways to help students learn this text structure. [[/[|http://www.literacymatters.org/lessons/textstructure.htm#track]]]

"[|What & Why]" - a science lesson on cause and effect

[|"Cause & Effect"] - how three teachers link cause and effect to writing and links to more websites

This site has lots of links to past articles for kids - they are short, interesting, and some of them are persuasive, so they would be a good resource. And they'd be good for teaching text structure. [|Scholastic]

[|Main Idea Practice] One of the hardest concepts for fourth graders is to determine the main idea of a passage. This is listed as one of our state standards and is one that many students struggle to understand. This is a great activity that can be done as a whole class. The passages are about Benjamin Franklin and so would be great to use for expository text. The students read a passage and then choose the main idea of that passage.

[|Main Idea - Volcanoes] In this activity, the students choose the correct main idea and you may click to find out why your answer was correct. It gives you instant feedback as well as reinforcement with each answer chosen. During this activity, our class could also determine which sentences are supporting details as well. This is a great way to cross the curriculum by bringing our interesting science standards into our reading standards. PDF file of a chart for predicting and inferring: