Curriculum

In fourth grade, students will be working to answer questions like:

• What are waves and what are some things they can do?

• How can water, ice, wind and vegetation change the land?

• What patterns of Earth’s features can be determined with the use of maps?

• How do internal and external structures support the survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction of plants and animals?

• What is energy and how is it related to motion? How is energy transferred?

• How can energy be used to solve a problem?

By the end of fourth grade, they will be able to:

• use a model of waves to describe patterns of waves in terms of amplitude and wavelength, and that waves can cause objects to move.

• develop understanding of the effects of weathering or the rate of erosion by water, ice, wind, or vegetation.

• apply their knowledge of natural Earth processes to generate and compare multiple solutions to reduce the impacts of such processes on humans.

• analyze and interpret data from maps.

• develop an understanding that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.

• describe that an object can be seen when light reflected from its surface enters the eye.

• use evidence to construct an explanation of the relationship between the speed of an object and the energy of that object.

• develop an understanding that energy can be transferred from place to place by sound, light, heat, and electric currents or from object to object through collisions.

• apply their understanding of energy to design, test, and refine a device that converts energy from one form to another.