Grade 4 Unit 2
- 1. Isaac School District No.5 ELAS Thematic Unit Overview Grade 4 – Unit 2 2012-2013 Unit 2: Literature Settings: Weather or Not DURATION: Six Weeks This unit encourages the exploration of geography as it relates to seasons and weather, and students discover how these settings are represented in and affect changes in literature. Students read contrasting styles of poems about weather, including Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” and Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow,” and discuss how poetic techniques affect the interpretation of poems. Then students read informational texts, such as “Kenya’s Long Dry Season” by Nellie Gonzalez Cutler, and apply the information learned to their appreciation of the setting of Safari Journal by Hudson Talbott. Students learn about geography and weather through a variety of informational texts. Class discussions will focus on the back- and-forth relationship between information gleaned from the informational texts and the insights they develop from literature. Essential Questions: Vocabulary: How does the author's use of setting affect the context plot of a story? explicit information inference How does the author’s use of specific poetic poetic devices: rhyme scheme, meter, simile, metaphor devices affect our interpretation of poems? poetic terms: stanza, lines, verse prediction Essential Learning: setting All stories occur in at least one place and at one time. The setting of a story may influence its outcome. Distributed Resources Aligned to Unit 2: Owen and Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (Hatkoff) A Prairie Alphabet (Bannatyne-Cugnet) Time of Wonder (McCloskey) Strawberry Girl (Lenski) Can It Rain Cats and Dogs? Questions About Weather (Berger) On the Banks of Plum Creek (Wilder) Underlined vocabulary indicates a Tier II word. 1
- 2. Underlined vocabulary indicates a Tier II word. 2