Grade 4 · Week 2text structure
Who Really Found the Cave
Grade 4 week 2. An archaeology article asks which of two people really walked into a painted cave first. The week works explicit statements against inferences with the sentence each one rests on (RI.4.1), the FIVE-syllable word and where the stress falls (RF.4.3.A, the unlock), and relative pronouns (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 an article about two people who each say they found the same painted cave, and decides which claim the evidence supports. Day 2 is a big one: it is the first time in the whole programme that your child takes apart a word with five parts, like unbelievable and refrigerator. 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 unmistakable. Watch for a child who treats a guess as an inference, and ask which sentence made them think it. If your child is not yet typing, they may draw their answer and tell it to you instead.
Who Really Found the Cave
High in the hills above the town of Rye Hollow there is a cave with paintings of deer and horses on its walls. Two people say they were the first to walk into it. A claim is what a person says is true. Nell Carver made her claim first. She was fourteen, she says, and she crawled through a gap in the rocks while she was looking for a lost sheep. Hugo Brandt made the second claim. He was a teacher who mapped caves on his school holidays. He says he found the same gap eleven years later, and that nobody had been inside before him. Evidence is the proof that shows whether a claim is true. Nell had no camera and no notebook. What she had was a story she told her family, and her family remembered every word of it. Hugo had paper. He wrote the date in his notebook, drew a careful map of every room in the cave, and posted a letter about his discovery to a museum in the city. Then a student found something nobody had noticed. Under the dust on the wall of the second room, close to the painted horses, somebody had scratched the letters N C and the year 1968. Nell Carver was fourteen in 1968. Hugo Brandt did not reach Rye Hollow until 1979. Two scratched letters are not much evidence, but they say that somebody stood in that room first. The town calls it Carver Cave now. Hugo keeps the first real map, and without that map nobody would know what the cave holds. A discovery can have more than one owner.