While we strive to teach all of the Utah Core Standards each year, there are certain standards we consider to be the most important in fourth grade--the most fundamental. We call those "target standards." We don't want students to leave fourth grade without being proficient especially in those standards, because it may be the last time students are explicitly taught those particular concepts. In math, they are addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers with regrouping, multiplication of multi-digit numbers by a single digit, and division of a multi-digit number by a one-digit divisor. Other concepts, such as fractions, are equally important for students to learn, but they will continue learning about them in future grade levels, so they are not considered "target standards" for fourth grade.
In language arts, since all standards are taught with increasing complexity at all grade levels, we consider all standards to be equally important, but we have identified the standards surrounding fundamental reading skills such as phonemic awareness, reading fluency, and reading accuracy to be our language arts target standards.
We consider all science and social studies standards to be equally important, and strive to help our students achieve proficiency in all of them.
What do we do with target standards, and what can you do at home? In class each day, we place special emphasis on our target standards by doing "flex" groups between all four classes. Students rotate to a different class for a half hour each day to get targeted instruction on those specific standards, and do not move on to the next target standard until they have demonstrated proficiency with the previous standard. Please help your student practice those concepts at home and give them the support they need to gain proficiency. If you need help with this, please get in touch with me so we can support each other!
Below is a list of the various programs we use at Armstrong, as well as those I use exclusively in my classroom:
Language Arts:
Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt IntoReading
iReady Reading
Acadience Learning Online
Lexia
Epic! Reading
Sora Reading
5-a-Day (language worksheet from Teachers Pay Teachers)
Daily Handwriting Practice book
Scholastic Book Club
Teacher-created materials
Math:
iReady Math
IXL
Building Fact Fluency
Flash cards
Xtra Math
Math Learning Center
Teacher-created materials
Science:
USBE science text book
PhET Simulations
Mystery Science
PocketLab Notebook
ReadWorks
Khan Academy
Generation Genius
Teacher-created materials
Social Studies:
Utah Program (musical)
Teacher-created materials
All other areas (health, art, etc.):
Typing Agent
Stop Motion Animator (Chrome extension)
Adobe Spark
YouTube
Mission.io
Nearpod
Google Earth
Kahoot!
Quizizz
EdPuzzle
Flipgrid
Ozoblockly (Ozobots)
Spheros
Micro:bits
VexGo Robots
Socrative
Code.org
Scratch (coding)
Code Combat
Ozaria (coding)
Flowlab (coding)
MakeCode
Piktochart
TinkerCad
Mind Up (social skills and dispositions)
Teacher-created materials