4th Grade

Fourth Grade Curriculum Overview

Reading
Fourth graders continue to read many types of text—literary, informational, and practical pieces. Through reading, they can make connections with situations beyond their own experience. In narrative texts, they recognize organizational patterns and motives of characters. They can make inferences, draw conclusions, and are learning to support their opinions about what they read. Fourth graders are becoming more skillful at following written directions and in reading for information in a variety of sources.

Writing
Fourth graders write for a variety of reasons and for different audiences. Students learn different ways to share their thinking in written form through explicit mini-lessons. The teacher may demonstrate the process using modeled or shared writing and engage the students in the construction of their written pieces.  Students can select their writing about reading from a range of possible forms.  Three forms of writing are collected throughout the year - narrative, persuasive and informative.

Parent Roadmap ELA

Mathematics
Fourth graders focus on three critical areas in Math. They develop an understanding and fluency with multi-digit multiplication and multi-digit division.  They develop an understanding and fluency with multi-digit multiplication and multi-digit division. They develop an understanding of fraction equivalence to include adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators and multiplying fractions by whole numbers.  They also develop an understanding of geometric figures based on their properties such as angle measurement and symmetry.  We test student knowledge of skills at the end of each unit and at the end of each semester.

Parent Roadmap Math

Social Studies
Fourth grade students explore the social disciplines of history, geography, civics and government, culture and economics through the context of North Carolina.  Students will study North Carolina, American Indian groups indigenous to the area before European contact, the impact of colonization and key historical events leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Building on a basic understanding of scarcity and choice, students learn to appreciate the relationships among scarcity, choice and opportunity costs when making financial decisions. Students explore North Carolina's economy by examining how natural resources have influenced economic development in our state.


Science
There are four core content areas for 4th grade science. In Earth History, students study the moon, what causes day and night and changes on the earth's surface.  In the Matter strand, students  study the physical properties of matter and rocks and minerals. In the Energy strand, students learn about forms of energy.  Finally in Ecosystems, students learn about animal adaptations.


Art/Music
Arts Education includes four separate and distinct disciplines; dance, music, theater arts, and visual arts—each with its own body of knowledge and skills, The intent of the National Standards for Arts Education, along with the standard courses of study in each area, is that a comprehensive understanding of one or more of the arts is accomplished by each student throughout the K-12 Program.

Health/PE
The Healthful Living Education program promotes behaviors that contribute to a healthful life-style and improved quality of life for all students. The Healthful Living Education portions of the NC Standard Course of Study support and reinforce the goals and objectives of its two major components—health education and physical education.