South Dakota ELA 4.RI.10.a
The Standard
- 4.RI.10
- By the end of the year, read and comprehend a variety of informational text.
Read and comprehend grade-appropriate text with increasing challenge in text difficulty and complexity (e.g., book conventions: title page, table of contents, index; layout, text structure, language features, and knowledge demands).
South Dakota English Language Arts Standards (2025)
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students read nonfiction books and articles that become harder over time. They use headings, contents pages, indexes, captions, and nearby sentences to find information and understand new ideas.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can use an index to find a topic, read the right section, and explain its main idea with a detail from the text. When a passage gets harder, they reread and use captions or context to work out what it means.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may use the contents page to hunt for a specific fact that is easier to find in the index. They may skip captions or guess what an unfamiliar word means without checking the sentence around it.
How to Assess It
- Give students a nonfiction book with a contents page and index. Ask: “Find a topic in the index, read that section, and write its main idea and one detail that supports it.”
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs a nonfiction book and sticky notes; have them mark where the contents page, index, and captions help answer questions.
Read two short articles on volcanoes; ask, “Which was harder to read, and what did you do when you hit a tricky part?”
Play a page-finding race: call out a topic, and have students use a book’s index to find and read the relevant paragraph.
Give students a park trail guide; have them use its headings and trail descriptions to pick a route for a one-hour walk.
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Printable 4.RI.10.a Worksheet
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