Grade 4 · Week 1Main idea
The Longest Bridge in Town
Grade 4 week 1. An engineering article asks why the first bridge over Otter Creek fell and why the second one holds. The week works main idea and the details that support it (RI.4.2), three part decomposition of unfamiliar multisyllabic words (RF.4.3.A), and capitalisation (L.4.2.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 an article about a bridge that fell and the bridge that replaced 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 unhappiness. Watch for a child who names the most memorable detail instead of the main idea, and ask, is that in every part, or only one part? If your child is not yet typing, they may draw their answer and tell it to you instead.
The Longest Bridge in Town
The first bridge over Otter Creek was the pride of our town. It was long, thin and new, and on the day it opened a brass band played on the deck. Everyone clapped. The distance a bridge crosses in one jump is called its span. Otter Creek is wide, so the span was long, and the flat deck hung in the air from two steel cables. For three weeks the bridge held. Then a steady wind came up the valley on a grey Tuesday. The deck began to roll, slowly at first, then hard, and the rolling did not stop. By morning the deck lay in the water below. Nobody was hurt, but the whole town was in shock. The loss was a real disappointment, and everyone asked the same question. An engineer is a person who plans how something is built and tests whether it will hold. The town asked an engineer named Ella Rivera to find out exactly what went wrong. Ella studied the wind for a year. The first bridge was flat and light, she said, so the wind pushed it like a sail and the deck twisted in an unexpected way. The second bridge was built with the wind in mind. Deep steel beams stiffen the deck, and open slots let the wind slip through instead of shoving the whole long span sideways. Thirty years later the second bridge still stands. Ella says a failure is not the end of the work. It is the part of the work that teaches you what to build next.