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Standard 1 : Key Ideas and DetailsArchived
Cluster Standards

This cluster includes the following benchmarks.

Visit the specific benchmark webpage to find related instructional resources.

  • LAFS.4.RI.1.1 : Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.2 : Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.3 : Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.
Cluster Information
Number:
LAFS.4.RI.1
Title:
Key Ideas and Details
Type:
Cluster
Subject:
English Language Arts - Archived
Grade:
4
Strand
Reading Standards for Informational Text
Cluster Access Points

This cluster includes the following Access Points.

  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.1a : Refer to details and examples in a text that are relevant to explaining what the text says explicitly.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.1b : Refer to details and examples in a text that are relevant to drawing basic inferences from an informational text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.2a : Determine the main idea of an informational text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.2b : Identify supporting details of an informational text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.2c : Identify how ideas are organized to summarize the text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.3a : Identify events, procedures, ideas or concepts in a historical, scientific or technical text.
  • LAFS.4.RI.1.AP.3b : Identify specific causes and effects that relate to events, procedures, ideas or concepts in historical, scientific or technical text.
Cluster Resources

Vetted resources educators can use to teach the concepts and skills in this topic.

Original Student Tutorials
  • Digging Deeper: Inferences: Learn the difference between explicit and implicit information, make an inference based on the information you read, and refer to details from the text to explain your thinking. This interactive tutorial will also help you learn about the largest turtle on earth, the Leatherback sea turle.

  • Uncovering the Main Idea: Learn how to identify explicit evidence and understand implicit meaning in a text

    Sometimes the main idea likes to hide out in the texts that you read. Lenny Lizard will give you some pointers on how to uncover the main idea and use key details to support your answers.

    By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to find the directly and indirectly stated main idea of a text. You will also learn how to identify and explain how key details support the main idea.

Lesson Plans
  • The Civil Rights Movement in Florida: Tallahassee Bus Boycott : African-Americans in Tallahassee boycotted the bus system for nearly seven months after the arrest of two Florida A&M University (FAMU) students for sitting beside a white woman. During the boycott, African-Americans in Tallahassee used car pools to get to and from work and for other necessary transportation. Twenty-one members of the Inter Civic Council were convicted on charges of operating an illegal transportation system for arranging the car pool without a franchise. In this lesson students analyze primary source images to write journal responses focused on what they learned about the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.

  • Railroads Change Florida: Henry Flagler in Florida: Henry Flagler was the founder of what became the Florida East Coast Railway. During the 1880s and 1890s, Henry Flagler expanded train lines through Jacksonville and down the East coast to Miami.

    Henry Flagler began the Oversea Railway in 1906 to connect Miami to Key West. This ambitious and innovative project required money, earth-moving, man-hours, and miles of bridges. In this lesson students analyze a letter from Henry Flagler to learn about about Flagler and his contributions to Florida.

  • Florida During World War II: World War II Homefront: Rationing: During World War II, shortages of a variety of civilian goods became commonplace. To ensure fair distribution, and that vital materials would be conserved for military use, the Federal government implemented a rationing policy on a wide variety of products. Gasoline, rubber, bicycles, shoes, sugar, fruits and vegetables, fats and oils, cheese, coffee, butter, meats, fish, certain canned goods, and even dried peas and beans were among the many products rationed for all or part of the war.

    In this lesson students will use primary sources to learn how the rationing of goods effected the lives of adults and children during World War II.

  • Mary McLeod Bethune: Photographs of Mary McLeod Bethune and Her School: Students will use photographs that depict different aspects of the Daytona Normal and Industrial School. Students will use prior knowledge to describe what they believe a day at the Daytona Normal and Industrial School would look like. Students write using evidence from the photographs.

  • Mary McLeod Bethune: Primary and Secondary Sources: In this lesson, students will examine documents and decide which are primary sources and which are secondary sources. This lesson is intended to give students an introduction to the concept of primary versus secondary sources and to prepare them for future study using more complex documents.

    The documents referenced in this lesson plan are from the Daniel M. Williams Papers, held by the State Archives of Florida. Williams collected various documents and photographs in order to write a biography of Mary McLeod Bethune.

  • Florida in the Civil War: Risking Their Lives for Salt: With the seemingly limitless supply of salt available to us today, it is hard to imagine the hardship imposed by its lack. The Confederate army's meat supply was preserved with salt. With the Union blockade in place, the Confederate states turned to local sources for this important mineral. Salt production became a crucial endeavor for citizens of Florida. In this lesson students will compare Confederate and Union perspectives of the salt works using an illustration, a letter and an excerpt from a memoir.

  • The Amazon Rainforest: In this lesson, students will read an informational article about the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. Students will identify and describe the cause/effect structure used throughout the article. Students will write an expository paragraph about events occurring in the Amazon Rainforest.

  • The Tree that Saved the Day!: In this lesson, students will read an informational picture book about a community in Africa that plants mangrove trees to help the community. Students will use a variety of strategies to determine the meaning of selected academic words in context. Students will also identify and describe the central idea and relevant details used throughout the book in order to write a summary paragraph.

  • Identifying Themes in Biographies: Lessons on Theme (2 of 2): This is the second lesson of a two-part unit on theme. Students will identify a universal theme in the biographical texts A Picture Book of Anne Frank by David Adler and Sojourner Truth by Gwenyth Swain. Students will chart significant events in each text and work to understand how these events create a universal theme in a person's life. The teacher modeling phase uses the text "Honoring King" about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the text is provided with the lesson. The first lesson in this unit has been attached as a related resource.

  • Reading of The Life and Times of the Ant: This lesson will provide an in depth look at informational text that is heavy with graphic features and links science to reading. By the completion of the lesson, the students will have studied the text features and text structure of an informational text. They will use information provided to explain an author’s claim.

  • Everglades Adventure: Students will take notes about the Everglades using a variety of resources. Students will identify appropriate text features that can be used to convey information. As a final product, students will practice their expository writing by creating an informational brochure about the Everglades that uses the description text structure and multiple text features.

  • Snapshot Sleuths: Native American Culture: Students will learn how to analyze primary documents and discover facets of Native American life by analyzing images of a variety of Native American villages. Students will compare and contrast Native American culture from different regions of the United States.

  • Shall We Rescue the Amazon?: In this lesson, students will learn how humans are impacting the environment by reading various informational texts on the topic of saving the rain forests. Students will determine the meanings of unknown content-specific words and identify the main idea and supporting details within the text. They will write a summary of the text and respond to a prompt by writing an opinion essay.

  • The Chocolate Miracle: In this lesson, students will briefly discuss background knowledge of the Berlin Airlift following World War II and then read Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot by Patricia A. Pierce. Students will then create a narrative story in which they describe an act of kindness. Students will utilize an editing checklist for giving and receiving peer feedback.

  • Finding the Central Idea and Relevant Details in Informational Texts: Students will read an informational text, will identify the central idea and relevant details, and record their findings on a graphic organizer. They will use the informational text and their graphic organizer to create a summary based on the text. The students will also answer questions based on the text. As a summative assessment for the lesson, the students will repeat this activity using a different informational text and will conduct the work alone, rather than in a group.



  • Holey Rusted Metal!: Students will conduct a guided inquiry lab involving the chemical change that creates rust. This lab is meant to be set up in one day and then observed over the course of 3 weeks.

  • “Chemical Changes: Rusting and Tarnishing”: In this integrated ELA lesson, students will determine the cause and effect relationship for types of metals that experience rusting and tarnishing. The students can also compare and contrast the chemical changes of rusting and tarnishing, which will help them further understand how matter can change. This integrated lesson will help students apply comprehension skills to better understand informational text.

  • Editorials- Facts that Support Opinions : In this resource, students will identify facts that are used to support an opinion in an editorial. Students will review three different editorials throughout the teacher modeling, guided practice, and independent practice. The practice passages are provided with the resource. With each passage, students will identify the subject of the editorial, the author's opinion, and facts that support the author's opinion.

  • Identifying Elements of a Biography: In this resource, students will identify and describe evidence in a text showing that it is a biography. In guided and independent practice activities students will use A Picture Book of Anne Frank by David A. Adler.

  • Keep it Cool –an Engineering Design Challenge: This Engineering Design Challenge is intended to help fourth grade students apply the concepts of the flow of heat from a hot object to a cold object and that heat flow may cause objects to change temperature. It is not intended as an initial introduction to this benchmark.

  • Properties of Matter: Color, Hardness, Texture, Odor, and Taste: In this lesson, students will use a compare and contrast chart (graphic organizer) to compare and contrast the different properties of matter – color, hardness, texture, odor, and taste. Students will also demonstrate the science concepts learned from reading informational text passages on the properties of matter.

  • Recycle This!: In this Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA), students will learn about recycling renewable and nonrenewable resources while completing a model eliciting activity in which they help Sunshine School District to decide which material to start their recycling program with.

    Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. MEAs resemble engineering problems and encourage students to create solutions in the form of mathematical and scientific models. Students work in teams to apply their knowledge of science and mathematics to solve an open-ended problem while considering constraints and tradeoffs. Students integrate their ELA skills into MEAs as they are asked to clearly document their thought processes. MEAs follow a problem-based, student-centered approach to learning, where students are encouraged to grapple with the problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. To learn more about MEAs visit: https://www.cpalms.org/cpalms/mea.aspx

Student Center Activities
Text Resources
  • Green Invaders!: This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. This National Geographic Kids article explains how the invasion of non-native plants is threatening native food webs.

  • Metamorphosis: This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. This article describes the complete and incomplete metamorphosis stages.

  • Weathering: This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. This article describes chemical, biological and mechanical weathering and includes causes and examples for each.

  • Another Link in the Food Chain: This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article describes how energy passes through food chains. Examples of each link in the chain and a description of its role in the food chain are given.

Unit/Lesson Sequences
  • Ruby Bridges: A Simple Act of Courage: In this unit, students will learn about the Civil Rights Movement through the perspective of Ruby Bridges, a young girl caught in the struggle for equality during this time. Vocabulary strategies, slideshows, graphic organizers, and text-based questions are all included to help students compare/contrast Ruby's world with their own.

  • Reading and Writing About Pollution to Understand Cause and Effect: In this lesson, third grade students access prior knowledge about water pollution before exploring the topic further using read-alouds. They then complete a sequencing graphic organizer using a story of a fish and its journey from the mountains to a polluted waterway. Finally, students' understanding of cause and effect is reinforced using a hands-on experiment, art project, and graphic organizer.