Grade 4 · Week 4reasons evidence
How a Volcano Builds an Island
Grade 4 week 4. An earth-science article that follows an island from molten rock under the sea floor to green plants on the surface, told in strict time order. The week works text structure as time order (RI.4.5), the Latin root port, meaning carry (L.4.4.B), and the progressive verb tenses (L.4.1.B).
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 true article about how an island is built out of the sea floor, one layer of hardened lava at a time. Day 2 is the word work: our root is port, and port means carry. Once they have it they can open report, reporter, import, export, transport and support with it. Watch for the prefix surprise on import, where im means in rather than not. Day 3 is the first time in the programme that your child meets the idea of text structure, and this article is built in time order, so the questions ask what happened first and what could not have happened yet. 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 portable. Watch for a child who retells every stage instead of naming the two the question asks for, and ask them for two stages only. If your child is not yet typing, they may draw their answer and tell it to you instead.
How a Volcano Builds an Island
An island in the middle of the ocean was not always there. Many of them began thousands of feet under the water, on the dark floor of the sea, long before anything showed above the waves. It starts with heat. Deep inside the earth the rock is so hot that it melts. Rock that has melted into a thick glowing liquid is molten rock, and it gathers in a pocket under the sea floor. Next the molten rock pushes upward, because melted rock is lighter than the cold rock around it. It finds a crack in the sea floor, and one day it forces its way out. Molten rock that has escaped onto the surface is called lava. The cold ocean water stops it almost at once, and the lava hardens into a sheet of black stone on the floor of the sea. The next eruption spreads new lava over that stone, and the eruption after that spreads more on top. Each hardened sheet is a layer, and one layer on its own is thinner than a wall. A single eruption builds almost nothing. The mound grows only when the layers stack up, one on the last, for thousands of years. Then at last the top of the pile breaks the surface, and a new island stands in the sun. Nothing about this is quick. The young island is black and bare, and the waves knock pieces off its edges at once. Rain wears the rock down into soil, and wind and birds transport seeds across the open water to it. Slowly the bare rock turns green. In the end the volcano goes quiet. The island stays behind, and every layer that supports your feet was carried up from deep inside the earth and laid down in its turn.