Your Child's Communication: Fourth Grade
By the end of fourth grade, your child should be able to do the following tasks in each area.
Listening
- Listen to and understand information.
- Form opinions based on what they hear.
- Listen for specific reasons, such as to learn, enjoy, or convince.
Speaking
- Use words correctly in conversation.
- Use language for many reasons, like asking questions, arguing, and joking.
- Understand some figurative language. This is language that uses words in new or different ways. For example, "This classroom is a zoo!"
- Take part in group discussions.
- Give correct directions to others.
- Summarize ideas in their own words.
- Organize information so it is clear.
- Give clear speeches.
Reading
- Read for specific reasons.
- Read grade-level books smoothly and with few mistakes.
- Use what they know to understand new material.
- Follow written directions.
- Take brief notes.
- Link what they learn in one subject to other subjects.
- Learn meanings of new words by looking at word origins, synonyms, and other meanings.
- Use reference materials, like a dictionary.
- Talk about the author's reason for writing a story and about the writing style.
- Read and understand different types of writing, like fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
- Make inferences from texts. This means that they guess what a writer means when it is not stated clearly. They use clues in the story and what they know from their life to guess.
- Talk about what they read in their own words, called paraphrasing.
Writing
- Write stories and explanations. Write many paragraphs about the same topic.
- Develop a plan for writing that includes a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Organize writing around a main idea.
- Edit final copies for grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
