New Jersey Student Learning Assessments English Language Arts Grade 4

Rafi carried a paper pinwheel along the Asbury Park boardwalk for his cousin Noor. The stick was thin. A hard gust bent it, and the pinwheel tipped into the rail. One paper wing tore. Rafi started toward a trash can.

Mrs. Pell, who sold kites from a small table, stopped him. "The tear is small," she said. "I can give you a spare stick, but you have to tie the string." A spare stick meant an extra one, not a broken one.

She looped the string, pulled it tight, and held the knot still so Rafi could see the crossing. His first knot slipped off the wood. His second knot held. He pressed a bit of tape over the torn wing.

Noor met him by the rail. The pinwheel turned again, slower than before, but it turned. Rafi kept the bent stick in his pocket so he would remember that the knot he tied had put the pinwheel back in Noor's hands.

A trail sign in Wharton State Forest, in the Pine Barrens, explains the cones of the pitch pine. Some cones on these trees stay shut for a long time. Resin, a sticky coating, holds the woody scales closed.

When heat from a fire softens that resin, the scales open and the seeds fall. The fire has also cleared a patch of ground. Seeds that land there can reach sunlight that taller brush would have blocked.

Ms. Okada, who wrote the sign, adds an important limit. Not every cone waits for a fire. Some open during ordinary hot weather. A hiker who sees a closed cone cannot know which kind it is just by looking.

The sign ends with a rule. Visitors must not hold a match under a cone to test the explanation. Forest heat is a natural event. A match in a hiker's hand is a danger, not a lesson.

I climbed the stairs inside Barnegat Lighthouse with Aunt Helen. Before the first step, I told her I would keep one hand on the rail. The windows were bright, and the turns were dim.

Halfway up, I saw a friend from Long Beach Island waving in the lot below. I let go of the rail and lifted both arms. My foot slid on the metal edge of a step. I caught the rail again before I fell. I was scared, and my heart felt loud in my ears.

Aunt Helen did not make a speech. She tapped the rail and said, "That promise was about this part of the climb, not only about the first step." We went the rest of the way with my hand on the rail. From the top, my friend looked small, and the inlet looked wide.

On the way down I wanted to wave again. I used one hand. The other stayed on the rail. A promise kept only at the bottom of the stairs was not the promise I had made.

Princeton's library steps keep the afternoon.

Each stone is warm where the sun stayed late.

My uncle says that warm is borrowed sun,

saved in the rock for shoes that arrive after.

I set my hand where his shoe has just been.

The middle is warm, and the edge is cool.

Borrowed heat is not a coat I can button.

It fades, and still it marks the way he went.

Caleb's ticket for a play in New Brunswick had two separate lines. The first line said Door C. The second line said Row F, Seat 4. He was so excited that he looked only at the letter C.

Inside the theater he sat in row C, seat 4. A woman already standing in that row held up her own ticket. Ms. Ito, the usher, asked to see Caleb's. "You already came through Door C," she said. "That letter names the entrance. Your seat is in row F."

Caleb stood up at once. The woman in row C sat down. He found row F and checked both the letter and the number before he sat. Ms. Ito nodded. "Same alphabet, two jobs," she said.

At intermission Caleb read the ticket again from top to bottom. The door had gotten him into the room. The row was the place he was supposed to stay. Mixing those jobs had put him in someone else's seat.

A sign on the Delaware and Raritan Canal in Lambertville calls the flat path a towpath. Tow means pull. When boats used the canal, a mule walked on that path and pulled a boat with a long rope.

The boat did not have a motor. The rope was tied to the boat, and the mule supplied the pull. If the mule stopped, the boat slowed, because nothing else was dragging it forward.

The sign says the path was built so the mule would have dry ground beside the water. People walk and bicycle there now. Bicycles are asked to go slowly when families are on the path. A fast bike can startle a walker.

The boats are gone, and the mules are gone. The path remains. Sunday shoes use a lane that was first made for work.

I was at Mrs. Lang's apartment in Westfield when the lights went out. I reached for the candle jar on the shelf. A note taped inside the cupboard said, "No candles. Use the flashlight. A candle near the curtains can start a fire."

We set the flashlight on the table and tipped it toward the ceiling. The light bounced off the white paint and spread through the kitchen. I asked why we did not just open the curtains and use the streetlight.

Mrs. Lang pointed at the stove. "The streetlight reaches the sofa," she said. "It does not reach the pot. The soup still needs stirring." The flashlight covered the part of the room where the work was.

When the lamps came back on, we clicked the flashlight off and put it in the cupboard in front of the note. The candle jar stayed where it was. The outage was over, but the rule was still taped in the same place.

Wes was making a poster at a public library in Camden. A display card about the Delaware River said, "Shad swim upstream to lay their eggs." He copied that sentence into the middle of his poster and wrote his own name under it, as if the words were his.

Ms. Quinn, the librarian, stopped at the table. She did not say the sentence was wrong. She asked, "Where did this line come from?" Wes pointed at the card. He felt embarrassed, and his face grew hot. He had wanted the poster to look as if he had thought of the sentence.

Ms. Quinn slid a pencil toward him. "You may keep the sentence," she said. "Add a small line that names the card, so a reader can tell your drawing from the library's words." Wes wrote, "From the Delaware River display card," under the sentence. He moved his name to the corner, next to a fish he had drawn himself.

The poster still held the fact he needed. It also held a trail back to the card. Wes said the trail was short, but it kept him from claiming words he had only copied.

A panel at Island Beach State Park explains why wooden platforms stand in the marsh. Storms had knocked down the tall dead trees where ospreys once nested. An osprey builds a large stick nest in a high, open place. It does not build that nest on the sand.

Rangers set flat platforms on poles. On this panel, a platform means a nest base raised above the marsh, not a stage for people. The poles stand away from the bathing beach so visitors are not under the nests.

The next spring, a pair of ospreys stacked sticks on one platform and raised chicks there. The panel's count says three chicks used that platform. No osprey nest was found on the open sand nearby.

The panel also asks visitors not to climb the poles or toss food. Food from people can draw gulls that take eggs. The platform takes the place of the lost trees only if the birds are left to use it.

Greta found a long white piece in the garden behind her aunt's house in Haddonfield. A sign at the town museum says a famous dinosaur skeleton was found there in 1858. Greta decided the garden piece must be another bone. She wanted to call the newspaper before dinner.

Her aunt carried the piece to the outdoor tap and washed off the dirt. A metal cap showed at one end. The other end was a broken wooden handle. It was an old garden tool, not a bone.

Greta's aunt used the word fossil for the museum skeleton. A fossil, she said, is what remains of an ancient living thing. A tool someone dropped in a garden is not a fossil, even if it is white and buried.

Greta put the tool on the steps and drew it in her notebook. Under the drawing she wrote, "White and buried is not enough." The famous skeleton is why the town has a museum. It is not proof that every pale stick in the dirt is a bone.

Reed Lane Footbridge in Brigantine is a low bridge for people walking between a park and a sandy path. It does not lift. Kayaks can pass under it. A boat with a tall cabin cannot, because the cabin needs more open room than the bridge leaves.

A sign on the rail uses the word clearance. Clearance means the open space between the water and the underside of the bridge. At low tide the water drops, so the clearance is greater. At high tide the water rises, and the clearance shrinks.

The sign tells boaters to read the tide before they try to go under. A paddler who ignores a rising tide can meet the bridge with the top of the boat. Walking across the bridge is a separate matter. The footpath stays open while the water changes.

The town kept this bridge low because the channel is meant for small boats. A lifting bridge was not built here. Height, not hurry, decides which boats can pass.

Hana planted sunflowers along the west side of a school garden in Plainfield. She liked the tall yellow heads. She did not measure the shadow they would cast in the afternoon.

Mr. Cho grew strawberries in the next row. By June the sunflowers were higher than the fence, and their shadow covered his plants for much of the afternoon. Those plants made leaves, but they made fewer berries than the row in full sun by the gate.

They picked on the same morning. Hana's sunflowers filled a bucket. Mr. Cho's basket was light. "They are healthy flowers," he said. "They are in the wrong relationship to my row." He meant their place made a shadow that hurt his berries. He did not ask her to pull the flowers up. He asked her to move them to the north edge, where the shadow would fall on the path.

Hana moved them that weekend. The berry row got the afternoon sun back. She still had the yellow heads, and they shaded a path where nobody was trying to grow fruit. A healthy plant can still be a problem if its shadow lands on a neighbor's crop.

Jules played flute in the Teaneck school band. In the middle of the new piece, the page printed the word rest over four counts. She packed her flute and told Mr. Berg she would stay home. "The music says I am on rest," she said.

Mr. Berg tapped the measure. "A rest here is not a day off," he said. "It is four silent counts inside the song. You still keep the beat. Then you play the notes that come right after." If she stayed home, the flute part would be missing for the whole piece, not only for those four counts.

Jules came to rehearsal. She counted the silence without blowing, then played the next phrase on time. The students around her had been holding long notes. Her entrance fit under them only because she had waited the written counts.

Afterward she erased "day off" from the note she had started in her folder. She wrote, "Rest means play nothing, then come in." The quiet part was still her job.

At the town beach on Lake Hopatcong, a red flag flies when the ice is closed. A sheet in the boathouse says the flag does not measure the ice in front of your boots. It means the town has not approved anyone going out.

The sheet gives a reason. Ice can look solid from shore and still be thin in the middle. Footprints are not a test. A person can take a few steps and turn back, leaving prints on ice that will not hold the next person.

While the red flag flies, the rule is to stay on shore. When the town approves the ice, workers take the red flag down and post a green sign with that day's date. Seeing no red flag is not an invitation to guess. The sheet says to look for the green sign.

Last January a visitor pointed at old prints and said the ice must be safe. The boathouse clerk shook her head and pointed at the flag. The prints were a story about someone else. The flag was the town's decision for that day.

I went to the Great Falls in Paterson with my class to write a short piece for our book. I wrote only about the loud water. I liked the way the noise filled my sentence. I did not look left or right.

Bea stood beside me at the fence. She pointed at the old stone mill buildings along the drop. "The falls are the loud part," she said. "Those mills used the falling water to run machines. Your piece sounds like the water is alone."

I added four lines about the stone walls and the windows. I did not pretend I had seen the workers. I wrote that the walls were still there, beside the water I heard. Bea read it and said, "Now the place has a job in it, not only a sound."

On the bus I almost erased the new lines because they were quieter than my first sentence. I left them. The loudest thing in front of me was not the whole story of that spot.

After a heavy snow in Ridgewood, Yara shoveled the steps of her own house. The walk looked finished to her. Across the narrow yard, Mrs. Klein's steps were still buried. Mrs. Klein used a cane, and the mail truck stopped at the curb, not at the door.

Yara watched Mrs. Klein test the top step and turn back. The cane could not find a firm place. Yara's arms were tired, and she almost went inside. Then she thought about the mail staying on the truck because the curb was blocked.

She cut a path from Mrs. Klein's door to the curb and scattered a little sand where the cane would land. Mrs. Klein came out again and reached the mailbox. The carrier put a letter in her hand instead of driving past.

Yara leaned on her shovel. Her own steps had been only part of the job. The storm did not end at her door if it still kept a neighbor from the curb.

At a glass studio in Millville, Mr. Silva showed a visiting class a blowpipe. The pipe is a hollow metal tube. He gathered a lump of molten glass on the end. Molten means melted by heat until it can be shaped.

He blew a steady breath through the pipe. Air pushed into the soft lump and made a bubble. Students could see the bubble grow only while the glass stayed hot. Mr. Silva turned the pipe so the bubble did not sag to one side.

If the glass cooled too soon, it became stiff. A stiff bubble could crack when he tried to shape it. He put the glass back at the furnace for a short reheat. The furnace made it soft again. The breath was what made the hollow center.

He told the class not to touch the pipe or the glass. A finished cup on the shelf had once been a hot lump, then a bubble, then a stiff shape that could be held. A card by the shelf says the order cannot be skipped. Cool glass does not take a breath.