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Look at Learning in Grade 4

4th Grade Website: lsnepal.weebly.com

We love 4th Graders! They are fun and goofy, capable of deep thinking and problem solving. They begin to see and wrap their minds around big issues, often being able to plan big world-changing ideas, yet not quite know how to deal with the pressures of smaller, everyday worries. Its an exciting year of learning, change, and growth! It's a year in which the children take great strides in recognizing the world around them, and begin defining the part they play on the world stage. The learning experiences in the fourth grade include the following areas of focus:

Social Studies
Our social studies is integrated into language arts and math. We study three major areas: - Values of ourselves and our classroom community - Economics - Social Inequality An in-depth look into all three units can be found here: http://lsnepal.weebly.com/units-of-study.html The Responsive Classroom is an integral part of our curriculum that encourages the development of emotional intelligence and social skills. The focus is to create a classroom community that is nurturing to both self-esteem and academic performance. BY THE END OF FOURTH GRADE STUDENTS: Identify stereotyping, bias, prejudice, and discrimination in their lives and communities. Make informed and reasoned decisions by seeking and assessing information, asking questions, and evaluating alternate solutions. Develop strategies to reach consensus and resolve conflict. Evaluate what makes a good rule or law. Select a local issue and develop a group action plan to inform school and/or community members about the issue. Identify actions that are unfair or discriminatory and propose solutions to address such actions. Make effective decisions as consumers, producers, savers, investors, and citizens, and accurately balance a bankbook. Describe how the interaction of all buyers and sellers influences prices. Identify the risks and potential returns to entrepreneurship, as well as the skills necessary to engage in it. Reading During the course of the year 4th grade literacy focuses on three themed-based units that are directly tied in with our social studies program: values, entrepreneurship and social inequality. It also studies the mystery genre in depth, as well as an Andrew Clements author study. Through independent reading, interactive reading, shared reading, writing about their reading, and reading discussions, students will practice higher level processing of a text such as inferral, interpreting symbolism, and making connections.

BY THE END OF FOURTH GRADE STUDENTS: - Have reached an R through T Instructional Fountas & Pinnell level with overall comprehension and accuracy of a text. Thinking within the Text - Gather and understand details while reading the text that will help in understanding characters, setting, and problem. - Identify and discuss the problem, the events of the story, and the problem resolution. Thinking beyond the Text - Make connections between the lives and motivations of characters and their own lives, even if the setting is a fantasy world or in the past. - Infer charters feelings and motivations from description, what they do or say, and what others think about them. - Recognize, understand, and discuss figurative language and symbolism. - Support thinking beyond the text with specific evidence based on personal experience or knowledge or evidence from the text. - Make connections to other texts by topic, major ideas, authors styles, and genres. - Derive and interpret the writers underlying messages (themes) Writing During writing workshop, fourth graders use Lucy Calkins Units of Study in addition to the Six Plus One Traits of Writing as they implement the writing process. Fourth graders learn to write a combination of genres including personal narrative, biographical, persuasive, and essay. Through Words Their Way spelling program, fourth graders will also strengthen their spelling. By the end of fourth grade students: Know the writing process and be able to follow it: collecting, selecting, experimenting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. With their personal narrative: students will reach Level 6 on the Lucy Calkins' Personal Narrative Continuum. Briefly, this entails that the narrators internal story (the narrator's thoughts and feelings) is interwoven in the sequence of actions, giving the focused personal narrative account new cohesiveness. With their essay: students will be able to identify and construct an essay with a central thesis and at least three supporting arguments for that thesis. With their persuasive writing: students will be able to write in several advertising genres to sell a single product.

Mathematics
Everyday Mathematics and Investigations are used as core resources to focus on the areas of Numeracy, Geometry, Measurement, Data Analysis and Problem Solving. Fourth graders are expected to have a secure grasp of basic addition and subtraction facts, as they focus on adding and subtracting decimals. They also are expected to know their multiplication tables, as multiplying multi-digit numbers and long division are also areas of focus in fourth grade. Students will work on simplifying and finding equivalent fractions, and using basic operations with fractions as well. BY THE END OF FOURTH GRADE STUDENTS: Compare and order whole numbers through 1,000,000. Identify and interpret the place value for each digit in numbers through 1,000,000. Change fractions like 1/2, 3/4, 1/10, to decimals and percent. Find equivalent fractions using common multiples and simplify fractions using common

factors. Compare and order decimals Add and subtract whole numbers and decimals. Multiply up to four-digit numbers by three-digit numbers. Divide four-digit numbers by a single digit. Estimate solutions to addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems. Round whole numbers and decimals to any given place value. Measure exact length using the metric system. Convert meter, centimeters and millimeters. Calculate area and perimeter of rectangles and parallelograms.

Science

Fourth grade science is an exploration of the scientific process, a study of electricity and magnetism, and a study of land and water. BY THE END OF FOURTH GRADE STUDENTS: Use the Scientific Method to investigate questions. Distinguish observations from ideas and speculations and predications about observations. Offer reasons for findings and also consider reasons suggested by others. Offer justifiable explanations when similar scientific investigations do not produce exactly the same results. Learn how to build a circuit, the properties of electricity, and the effect of magnets on current. Learn the water cycle and how land and water interact. Technology Technology is integrated into the classroom to support the core subject areas. We use online rooms to extend our class beyond the classroom walls, use a variety of web 2.0 tools to support and extend kids learning, and use video and audio recorders to record our group work, and increase our logical and computational thinking with computer programming. We also try to bridge the gap between home and school lives. We do this by asking and attempting to answer the following questions: How can I be a critical consumer of online content? What does it mean to be a responsible digital citizen? How can I use the internet to safe and reliable research?