What is this skill?
Fourth grade nonfiction asks children to read a page of facts and then do something with it: say what it is mostly about, support the point with evidence, explain a word from the text, and see why an author used a comparison. The passages in this practice run about 190 to 220 words, a good length for the articles and textbook sections children meet this year.
There are five of them: "The Arctic Tern: Champion Traveler," "How a Refrigerator Keeps Food Cold," "The Mystery of the Dinosaur Colors," "The Statue of Liberty's Changing Color" and "Your Amazing Bones." The questions ask how far the tern travels, why the author mentions sweat, what melanosomes are, what caused the statue to turn green, what "patina" means and why the author calls marrow "a factory." Shorter reads cover a coral reef paragraph, how a hurricane loses strength, the evidence that Mars is cold, the word "durable," a blue whale comparison and what you can conclude about bats. Two yes-or-no questions ask for exact facts, such as whether the text says lightning flashes about 40 times every second. A sorting task separates a main idea from its details with sentences about the Sahara, and a tree-to-paper-cup question asks for the steps in order.
Why it matters
Informational text is where school knowledge lives: science, social studies and later every course in middle school. Children who can find the point of a passage and check it against the evidence are not only reading better, they are learning faster, since each paragraph they read leaves something behind.
Questions about why an author included something are an early lesson in media literacy. A child who asks "why did the writer put this here?" is on the way to noticing when a text is trying to persuade or when a comparison is helping to explain.
Common mistakes
- Mistaking a conclusion for a copied fact. "What can you conclude?" asks for a sensible next step from the evidence, such as why farmers might want bats nearby, which the text does not say outright.
- Treating every detail as equally important. When a passage has a lot of numbers, a child may pick a number for the main idea. Ask, "What do all these numbers add up to?"
- Answering from outside knowledge. A child may know a lot about dinosaurs and answer from that. In this practice the text is the final word.
- Skipping the definition built into the passage. Words like patina and compressor are explained in the text, usually right next to where they first appear.
How to help at home
- After an article, ask for the main idea in one sentence and two details that prove it. If the details do not fit, the main idea may need another try.
- Choose a comparison from a book, like "the size of a school bus," and ask why the author picked it and whether it helps.
- Have your child explain how something works, such as a refrigerator or a toaster, using the steps in order. Then read about it and see how close they came.
- Ask, "What is the text really telling us, and how do you know?" The second half of that question is the more useful one.
Worked examples
These are real questions from the Tutorsaurus 4th grade nonfiction reading practice, with the answers worked out.
Example 1
What is the main idea of this passage?
The Arctic Tern: Champion Traveler No animal on Earth travels farther in a year than the Arctic tern. This slim seabird, with its white body and black cap, weighs less than a baseball. Yet every year it flies from the Arctic, near the North Pole, all the way to Antarctica, near the South Pole, and back again. That round trip is about 44,000 miles. Over its lifetime of around 30 years, a single tern may fly more than a million miles. That is like flying to the Moon and back more than twice. Why does the tern make this incredible journey? The answer is sunlight. The tern spends summer in the Arctic, where the sun shines almost all day. When winter comes to the north, the bird heads south, arriving just in time for the Antarctic summer. In this way, the Arctic tern sees more daylight than any other creature. The trip is not a straight line. Terns follow curving paths over the ocean to catch helpful winds. They rest on the water and snack on small fish and krill along the way. Scientists tracked these routes by attaching tiny devices, lighter than a paper clip, to the birds' legs.
Choices: The Arctic tern makes the longest migration of any animal, The Moon is far away, Terns eat small fish, Scientists like birds
Answer: The Arctic tern makes the longest migration of any animal. The whole passage explains the tern's amazing pole-to-pole journey.
Example 2
Put the steps of how a tree becomes a paper cup in order.
The pieces, mixed up: The paper is coated with a thin waterproof layer / Trees are cut and ground into pulp / The pulp is pressed and dried into paper / The paper is cut and rolled into cup shapes
Answer: Trees are cut and ground into pulp → The pulp is pressed and dried into paper → The paper is coated with a thin waterproof layer → The paper is cut and rolled into cup shapes. Pulp comes first, then paper, then the waterproof coating, and finally the cup shape.
Example 3
What can you conclude from this text?
Bats are the only mammals that can truly fly. A single little brown bat can eat about 1,000 mosquito-sized insects in an hour. Farmers in some areas put up bat houses near their fields.
Choices: Mosquitoes eat bats, Bats cannot fly well, Bats are dangerous to farms, Farmers want bats nearby to eat insect pests
Answer: Farmers want bats nearby to eat insect pests. Since bats eat huge numbers of insects, farmers put up bat houses to help control pests.