Grade 4 -- Language Mechanics Scope and Sequence

The Language Mechanics (Grade 4) Teaching Guide that you received in the workshop has activities for every concept.

Recommendations:

(1)Formative Assessments every week or couple of weeks

(2)Looping for ongoing review – keep pulling in skills you’ve already taught

(3)Format – Have students actually generate sentences that illustrate concepts and rules. You’ll be helping students become better readers and writers.

Week / Concept / Notes
1 / Optional: You may choose to give the Overview PowerPoint to assess students’ knowledge.
2 / Topic sentences/purposes of paragraphs
A, an – brief, brief review (15 min. at most; if you have students who need a phonics lesson, RtI might be a great place for a mini-lesson.) / I would teach these concepts (purposes and topic sentences) together to show students how to build topic sentences for specific purposes.
I would teach all of the purposes this week. As you move on to teaching in depth the three types of writing, you can refer back to these purposes.
3 / Review/continue topic sentences/purposes of paragraphs
Paragraph unity – eliminating irrelevant information
Paragraphing – ordering of information / As you teach these concepts, keep referring to the overview PowerPoint to remind yourself how the questions will be asked.
4 / Double Negatives—brief lesson
Commas – after salutation; between city and state; setting off the words, for example
5 / Apostrophes, contractions and possessives
6 / Adjectives, comparative and superlatives
Quotation marks, around direct quotes and story titles
7 / Capitalization, first word of direct quote
Comma, with direct quotation
Adverbs, knowing when to use adverb instead of adjective
8 / Capitalization, days of week, cities, states – brief lesson
Capitalization – all words in location or place
Capitalization, title before a name
Overcapitalization – Term Paper, Book Report, etc.
9 / S-V Agr., singular and plural
S-V order in sentences – “Who” or “what” should come first in a sentence. / You will need to teach/review prepositions and prep. phrases here before you teach students that a subject can never be in a prep. phrase.
10 / Pronouns-subjective, objective
Overuse – personal pronoun following a subject
11 / Commas, overuse, separating a subject and verb
Verb Tense – past, present, future
12 / Verb Tense cont.
Capitalization—titles, languages
13 / Commas, with coordinating conjunctions
Commas, with subordinating conjunctions
14 / Commas, coordinating conj. or sub. cont.
Commas, in a listing; in a listing following a colon
Parallelism, in a listing
15 / Paragraphing, adding sensory detail (Teach in conjunction with narrative writing.)
16 / Fragments, prep. phrases
 adjective phrases beginning with –ingdependent clauses beginning with sub. conj.
17 / Run-ons, short sentence joined by only a comma or with no punct.
18 / Wordiness, repetition of words, words that mean the same
Combining sentences
19 / Give overview PowerPoint to assess students’ progress.
20 / Reteach/review skills.
21 / Reteach/review skills.
22 / Reteach/review skills.
23 / Reteach/review skills.
24 / Reteach/review skills.
25 / Reteach/review skills.
26 / Reteach/review skills.
27 / Reteach/review skills.
28 / Reteach/review skills.
29 / Reteach/review skills.
30 / Reteach/review skills.