2019-2020 Fourth Grade SEL

Interactive “foldables” help students learn new vocabulary through defining, illustrating and using words in sentences.

My Pile, Your Pile is an interactive word game that increases students’ Tier Two and Tier Three vocabularies.

Word webs are mind maps that promote active learning and help students develop higher-order thinking skills. Students map their thinking in a graphic organizer based on a Frayer model.

Agree/disagree statements challenge students to think critically about their knowledge of a topic, theme or text. The strategy exposes students to the major ideas in a text before reading—engaging their thinking and motivating them to learn more. It also requires them to reconsider their original thinking after reading the text and to use textual evidence to support and explain their thinking.

Generating Interactions between Schemata and Texts (GIST) is a summarization procedure that helps students digest complex texts by requiring contextual word learning. GIST explicitly combines the most important words with reading and writing to comprehend complex texts.

QAR gives students practice questioning the text and identifying literal and inferential questions. Students learn to find different types of evidence and to rely on their own interpretation when doing close reading.

SQP2RS stands for survey, question, predict, read, respond and summarize. SQP2RS (or “Squeepers”) ensures students recognize the steps to reading and understanding informational texts.

Think Aloud requires readers to stop during their reading to think, reflect and discuss their process. Readers talk about skipping text, rereading, searching back in the text for information, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, making connections, reflecting, predicting and visualizing.

During Affirmation Interview, students practice verbal and non-verbal communication in the roles of “interviewer” and “interviewee.”

Fishbowl is a strategy for organizing medium- to large-group discussions. Students are separated into an inner and outer circle. In the inner circle, or fishbowl, students have a discussion; students in the outer circle listen to the discussion and take notes.

Save the Last Word for Me is a comprehension strategy that builds speaking and listening skills by structuring a text-based discussion for students. Students highlight two to three of the most important sentences of the central text, then discuss their text-based responses in small groups.

Student teams look for clues and respond to questions that help them identify details, organization, inferences and comparisons in the central text.

Students take a stance on a topic related to the central text and listen while classmates explain their stances.