4th Grade Report Overview

The Open Court Grade 4 materials partially met the expectations for text quality and complexity and alignment to the expectations of the standards. Materials include high-quality texts of appropriate complexity throughout the year. Some strategies and routines, including those for independent reading may need to be supplemented to align with the standards.

Text-based opportunities, protocols, questions and tasks support students as both listeners and speakers. On-demand and process writing opportunities encompass all the genres set forth in the standards, though informative/explanatory writing has greater coverage. The program includes explicit instruction in and practice of grammar skills.

Materials contain explicit instruction in and assessment of grade-appropriate foundational skills across the year. However, the materials lack teacher guidance for remediation and support of students who are not performing at grade level. The continued growth and application of foundational skills is not supported in all parts of the reading program.

Not all units in the program effectively build students’ knowledge on a topic. While text analysis is well-covered, including some analysis of knowledge and ideas within and across texts, not all questions and tasks compel students to return to the text to support their contentions and conclusions.

Students engage in frequent writing tasks across the year however they may not achieve the full balance of writing genres outlined in the standards. 

The Inquiry projects that conclude each unit teach some research skills but do not provide adequate growth in those skills. These projects also fall short of demonstrating the growth of students’ knowledge and skills from the unit.  

The materials provide coverage of the standards throughout all units and over the course of the year, however, the preponderance of repetitive, unaligned reading strategies throughout the program moves the focus of the instruction, questions, tasks, and assessments away from a tight focus on grade level standards alignment. The program also contains a large volume of material without a suggested daily schedule; therefore, a full and standards-aligned implementation could be challenging.