Grade 4 · Week 3authors purpose
The Boy Who Would Not Sit Still
Grade 4 week 3. A boy who cannot sit still finds a sketchbook and a pencil, and finds out what focus feels like. The week works details and inferences in a story (RL.4.1), the first Greek root of the year, graph, meaning write or draw (L.4.4.B), and relative adverbs (L.4.1.A).
On screen - your kid, alone
- 1Day 1 - Meet the story
- 2Day 2 - Word work
- 3Day 3 - What it means
- 4Day 4 - Fix & re-read
- 5Day 5 - Show what you know
Offline - with you
Print the pages for offline work together; the answer key is for you.
This week your child reads a story about Rafi, a boy who cannot sit still until his aunt brings him a sketchbook and one pencil. Day 2 is the big one: it is the first time in the whole programme that your child meets the idea of a ROOT, a part inside a word that carries the meaning. Ours is graph, and it means write or draw. Once they have it they can open photograph, paragraph, telegraph, autograph, graphite and geography with it. On day 5 they read their paragraph out loud to you and you ask them the printed question. Three share rules: listen to the whole question, answer one at a time, stay on this text. Listen to how they read photographer. Watch for a child who reads graph as a whole word rather than as a part of a longer word, and cover the rest of the word with your thumb so only the root shows. If your child is not yet typing, they may draw their answer and tell it to you instead.
The Boy Who Would Not Sit Still
Rafi could not sit still. In class his knee bounced, his pencil rolled off the desk, and his eyes went to the window whenever a bus went past. His teacher called him restless. At home it was the same. Rafi would fidget through dinner, twisting his fork and swinging his feet under the chair, until his mother put a hand on his shoulder and asked him to be still. Nobody was cross with him. They only wanted him to focus, and to focus is to hold your attention on one thing long enough to finish it. Rafi wanted that too. He had never found the thing. On a wet Saturday his aunt Nadia came with a flat brown parcel. Inside was a sketchbook of thick pale paper and one pencil. "Draw what you actually see," she said, "not what you think is there." Rafi carried the pencil to the window and started on the bus stop across the road. The soft grey line a pencil leaves behind is graphite, and graphite will smudge under your thumb. He drew the bent pole and the cracked bench. He drew the same bench again, because the first one leaned the wrong way. When his mother called him for lunch, two hours had gone. His knee still bounced on the bus. He still lost pencils. But now, whenever the room grew too loud, Rafi opened the sketchbook and the noise slid away behind the line he was making. A photograph catches a place in one blink. A drawing asks for an hour, and Rafi had found out that he could give one. He was not a still boy. He was a boy who had found his still thing.