Thinkabara

📖 4th Grade · ELARI.4.3Unit 4: Informational text: structure & main idea

Explaining events and ideas

Google Classroom

🎯 Objective: Students explain events or concepts in scientific or historical texts.

Lesson outline

  1. Read about an inventor.
  2. Explain what happened and why.
  3. Write.
  4. Exit: one explanation.

Lesson 5 of 6 in this unit. In the Lesson Planner this lesson takes 1–3 class periods depending on your timetable: day 1 introduce & model, then practice, small-group reteach and a quick check.

📐 Standard

RI.4.3

Common Core State Standards for ELA, Grade 4 — typical US scope & sequence (literacy block)

🏁 Unit goals

  • Describe text structures
  • Determine the main idea and summarize

✅ Check for understanding

End with the exit ticket in the outline. Sort answers into got it / almost / not yet and start the next lesson with a 5-minute reteach for the “not yets”.

Practice & resources on Thinkabara

🎯 Practice: Text structure🦫 Encyclopedia: Inventors📚 All 4th Grade skills📚 Read-aloud stories⚡ Capy Live class quiz

🗓️ Plan the whole year like this

Add 4th Grade ELA to your free Lesson Planner: enter your timetable once and every period shows the next lesson, skipping weekends and school breaks.

Add to my planner See the year’s sequence

More lessons in “Informational text: structure & main idea”

  1. Main idea and summary
  2. Chronological and sequence
  3. Compare-contrast
  4. Cause-effect and problem-solution
  5. Explaining events and ideas
  6. Firsthand vs secondhand

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