Georgia Milestones Assessment System English Language Arts Grade 4

Mina had never paddled a canoe, and the black water of the Okefenokee Swamp made her nervous. Her uncle Dale sat behind her and held the long paddle steady. “Keep your eyes on the trail,” he said, “and let the canoe do half the work.”

The trail was a narrow channel cut through floating mats of peat and tall grass. Mina's first strokes were crooked, and the canoe bumped a cypress knee. A heron lifted off the log beside them and flapped away. Mina laughed, and her shoulders loosened.

An hour later, the sky turned gray and a cool wind pushed the lily pads flat. Dale pointed toward a wooden platform ahead. They reached it just as rain began to tap on the water. Because they had stayed close to the trail, the platform was easy to find, and they waited under its tin roof until the shower ended.

On the paddle back, Mina no longer watched the water with worry. She watched the trail markers and matched her strokes to her uncle's. When the dock came into view, she realized she was sorry the trip was almost over.

On a hill outside Fort Valley, the Calloway family grows peaches on forty acres. Peach trees bloom in early spring, and each pink blossom can turn into one peach. A spring frost is a danger to those blossoms because freezing air can damage them before they set fruit.

Last March, the forecast called for a hard freeze. The Calloways had a problem: they could not cover forty acres of trees. Mr. Calloway chose another plan. He ran sprinklers all night. As water froze on the blossoms, it wrapped each one in a thin shell of ice that stayed near the freezing point and shielded the bud from colder air.

The plan worked on most of the orchard. In June, workers picked peaches by hand, because the fruit bruises easily. They sorted the peaches by size and sent the best ones to the roadside stand. Smaller peaches were sold for jam.

Mrs. Calloway says the orchard taught her family to watch the weather every night in spring. Now they keep a notebook by the back door where they write down each night's low temperature.

I come down early to the dock,

before the heat, before the sun,

and every blade of cordgrass wears

a little coat of silver dew.

The tide has slipped away to sea

and left the mud all shiny-smooth.

A fiddler crab, no bigger than

a button, waves his giant claw.

I whisper, “Good morning, little king,”

and kneel as quiet as a stone.

The sun climbs up. The grass turns gold.

I carry home the marsh's hush

like a warm stone in my pocket.

My cousin Tavi and I reached the base of Arabia Mountain before nine o'clock. The rock rose in a bald gray hump, and tiny red plants grew in pools of rainwater on its top. Tavi said I should not step on the red plants. I nodded, but I was thinking only of the climb.

I started up too fast. My shoes slid on the loose grit, and my heart thumped. Tavi did not hurry me. “Omar,” she said, “walk like the rock is asleep and you don't want to wake it.” I slowed down and set each foot flat. The slipping stopped.

At the top, the wind pulled at my shirt, and the pine trees looked small enough to hold. I pointed at a thin line of pools below, and Tavi told me the red plants grew only where water collected. I stepped back from the edge of a pool with care. I had nearly missed seeing how small and strange the plants were.

On the way down I walked the way Tavi taught me. When we reached the car I told her that next time I would listen the first time.

For many years, a stretch of old train track in southeast Atlanta sat empty. Weeds grew between the rails, and broken glass lay in the gravel. Neighbors called it the Gap because it separated two streets that had no safe way to meet.

In 2019, a group of neighbors asked the city for permission to turn the Gap into a community garden. The city agreed to lend the land if the group cleaned it and kept it tidy. Volunteers hauled away fourteen truckloads of trash.

Today, the Gap looks very different. Raised wooden beds hold collards, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes. A paved path runs where the weeds used to grow, so people can walk from one street to the other. Before, children avoided the area. Now they stop to water the beans.

Anyone may pick vegetables on Saturdays. Volunteers ask only that visitors take what they will eat and leave the rest to ripen.

From May to August, loggerhead sea turtles come ashore on Georgia's barrier islands at night to lay eggs. A mother turtle digs a hole in the dry sand with her back flippers, lays about a hundred eggs, covers them, and returns to the ocean. She does not stay to guard them.

Volunteers on Jekyll Island walk the beach at dawn, looking for flipper tracks. When they find a nest, they mark it with stakes and a bright ribbon so beachgoers will not step on it. About two months later, the eggs hatch.

Hatchlings find the ocean by moving toward the brightest horizon, which is usually the sky over the water. Bright porch lights or flashlights near the beach can confuse them. Some crawl toward the lights and away from the sea. For this reason, the island asks homes near the beach to turn off outdoor lights during nesting season.

Volunteer Jun Park says the best part of the job is the night a nest hatches. “You see dozens of tiny turtles pour out of the sand,” he says, “and each one is the size of a cookie.”

Every November my grandfather and I gather pecans under the tall trees behind his house in Albany. He brings two buckets and a long wooden rake. I bring a pair of gloves, because the green husks that split open can stain your fingers brown.

This year I wanted to finish fast. I tossed pecans into the bucket without looking at them. Grandpa picked one up and tapped it against his palm. It rattled. “Hollow,” he said. “This one is empty inside.” He told me to shake each nut before keeping it.

I was annoyed at first. Shaking every pecan made the work slower. But when we cracked a few at the kitchen table, every nut I had shaken held a full, buttery kernel. Grandpa smiled. “Slow hands save time,” he said.

Now I shake each pecan as I pick it up. By noon we had two full buckets. Grandma will turn half of them into a pie, and I will crack the rest on the porch.

The Marlow Point Light stands at the edge of Tybee Island, where the Savannah River meets the Atlantic Ocean. It is 94 feet tall, with a white tower and a black lantern room at the top. Ships once relied on its beam to find the safe channel at night.

In its first years, the light burned oil. A keeper climbed 128 steps each evening to fill the lamp and trim the wick. In stormy weather he climbed again at midnight to clean the glass, which clouded with salt spray.

In 1938, the lamp was changed to run on electricity. A switch now turned the light on at dusk, and the keeper's nightly climb was no longer needed. The old keeper's cottage became a small museum.

Today visitors can climb the tower on weekends. At the top, a guide explains how the curved lens bent the light into a single beam. From the gallery, the visitors can see the channel and a long line of waiting ships.

Jaylen and his sister Dani floated on inner tubes down a gentle stretch of the Chattahoochee River near Helen. The sun was bright, and the water was clear enough to show the pebbles below. Their mother waited at the pickup landing two miles downstream.

Halfway there, Dani noticed that the water had turned the color of milky tea. A branch drifted past, then a whole bush. “It must have rained up in the mountains,” she said. “Rain far upriver can make the river rise here, even when the sky above us is blue.”

Jaylen wanted to keep floating, but the current was already pulling them faster. Dani remembered the guide's rule: if the river changes, paddle to the bank. She leaned her body toward the shore and kicked, and Jaylen copied her. Their tubes scraped onto a gravel bar.

They walked along the bank until they reached the landing. Their mother hugged them both. Jaylen said, “I thought the sunny sky meant we were safe.” Dani answered, “The sky told us about right here. The river was telling us about farther away.”

On the Huff farm near Lyons, Georgia, onion growers begin in the fall. They plant tiny seeds in a bed of soil and, six to eight weeks later, move the young plants into long rows. The plants spend the winter growing roots.

In spring, the bulbs swell underground. Farmers watch the weather and the soil carefully because too much water can make bulbs rot. When the green tops flop over, the onions are ready to be pulled.

Next comes curing. Pulled onions lie in the field for a few days, then workers move them to a barn. Fans blow air across them until the outer skins turn dry and papery. A cured onion can be stored for weeks without spoiling.

After curing, workers sort the onions by size and pack them into mesh bags. Trucks carry the bags to stores across the country.

Priya stood at the top of the wooden stairs that led down to the waterfall in Cloudland Canyon. There were hundreds of steps, and the bottom looked far away. Her classmates were already clomping down, but Priya held the rail and stayed where she was.

Mr. Banks, the park ranger, walked over. He did not tell her to hurry. “I count steps when a trail feels long,” he said. “Count fifty, then rest. Fifty is a number you can handle.” Priya tried it.

At fifty, she rested beside a mossy rock. At one hundred, she heard the waterfall, a low roar that grew louder at each landing. By two hundred, she could feel cool mist on her cheeks.

At the bottom, her class was sitting on boulders and eating crackers. Priya sat down and looked up at the long stairs she had crossed. “That was fifty after fifty after fifty,” she told Mr. Banks, and he grinned.

Two bridges cross Alder Creek in Madison County. One is a covered bridge built of heart pine in 1885. The other is a concrete bridge opened in 1996. Both carry people over the water, but they are built for different kinds of travelers.

The covered bridge is narrow. Only one wagon or car at a time can pass through, and a sign asks drivers to go no faster than five miles an hour. Its wooden roof keeps rain off the planks, which helps the boards last longer.

The concrete bridge is wide enough for two lanes of trucks. It has no roof, but its steel rods and thick slabs do not rot when they get wet. Snow plows and school buses cross it daily.

Most visitors prefer to walk the old bridge, where their footsteps echo off the boards. Most drivers choose the new one, because it saves time.

On Saturday mornings, my aunt and I set up a folding table at the farmers market in Athens. She sells blackberry jam, and I am in charge of the sample spoons. I am nine, and I take my job seriously.

At first, I put the sample jar at the front of the table, but people walked past without stopping. I watched a man at the next table hand out a slice of apple to everyone who passed, and a line formed. My aunt said, “People stop for what they can taste.”

So I stacked my spoons in a paper cup and held one out to each person who walked by. A girl my age tried the jam and frowned. “It's too tart,” she said. I told her the berries were picked ripe, not sugared, and that the jam is best on warm bread. She laughed, and her father bought two jars.

By noon, the table was nearly empty. My aunt counted the money and gave me a dollar for each hour I worked. I put it in my pocket and decided that next week I would bring a sign that tells people to ask for a taste.

Bottlenose dolphins swim in the tidal creeks near Brunswick, Georgia, and sometimes follow fishing boats to look for an easy meal. Most of the time, the dolphins stay safe. But one summer, several dolphins were found tangled in loose fishing line.

Scientists at the Glynn Marine Center studied the problem. They learned that anglers were tossing used line into the water instead of throwing it away. Old line is thin and nearly invisible. A dolphin cannot see it, and once it wraps around a fin, the animal cannot easily break free.

The center and local bait shops tried a simple fix. They placed long white tubes at each public dock where anglers could drop used line. Each tube has a sign with a picture of a dolphin. Within a year, volunteers found far less line floating in the creeks.

The scientists say the tubes work because they are easy to use. A tube costs little, and no one must walk far to find one.

Rafael had practiced for weeks to lead the Hillcrest Middle School band down Cherry Street in Macon. As drum major, he wore a tall white hat and carried a baton he could twirl and toss. His stomach fluttered as he stood at the start of the parade route.

When the whistle blew, he raised his arm and the band stepped off. The first block went well. On the second block, a gust of wind lifted his hat and sent it rolling toward the curb. Rafael's face grew hot. He wanted to chase it.

But the band was still marching, and the tubas needed his signal at the corner. Rafael kept his eyes forward and swung his baton in a wide arc. The band turned smoothly. A little boy on the sidewalk picked up the hat and held it high, and the crowd cheered.

At the end of the route, the boy ran up to return the hat. Rafael thanked him and set it back on his head, a little crooked. The band had come first, he thought, and the hat could wait.

On cool mornings in the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia, the valleys often fill with thick fog while the mountaintops stand clear in sunshine. Hikers on Brasstown Bald can look down at what seems like a white lake.

The fog forms because of how air behaves at night. After sunset, the ground loses heat and cools the air touching it. Cool air is heavier than warm air, so it slides downhill and pools in the valleys. Air also holds water vapor, an invisible gas. When the air gets cold enough, the vapor turns into tiny drops that hang in the air. Those drops are fog.

As the sun climbs, it warms the valley air. The drops warm up and turn back into vapor, and the fog thins until the valley is clear.

People who drive through the valleys at dawn are advised to slow down, turn on their headlights, and leave extra space between cars. Fog makes it hard to see far ahead.

My great-aunt Odessa has a pottery shed behind her house in Jasper County, and the floor is dusted red from the clay of the Georgia Piedmont. When I visited last summer, she handed me a lump the size of a grapefruit and said, “Make me a bowl.”

I squeezed and pressed, but my bowl kept collapsing. The sides sagged like a tired balloon. I wanted to quit. Aunt Odessa sat beside me and said, “Clay remembers every push. If you shove it, it fights you. If you coax it, it follows.”

I tried again, this time pressing my thumbs into the lump slowly and lifting the walls an inch at a time. When the bowl finally stood, it was lopsided, with one side higher than the other. My aunt turned it in her hands and said she had never seen a bowl with so much character.

She fired the bowl in her kiln, and it came out the color of a cooked sweet potato. Now it sits on my desk at home and holds paper clips. When I pick one up, I remember the afternoon I stopped shoving and started coaxing.