Science
The main focus of our fourth grade science curriculum is in providing opportunities for students to engage in and understand science practices, explore issues related to engineering practices, as well as the use of natural resources. Students apply what they know as they complete hands-on activities, which helps strengthen current understanding and promotes new knowledge of the world around us. While actively participating in scientific investigations, students observe objects and events, think about how they relate to what is already known, test their ideas in logical ways, analyze outcomes, and generate explanations that describe what, why, and how a certain result occurred.
Students will learn skills that allow for successful inquiry and explanation.
Students will review the steps of the scientific method.
Students will design and carry out experiments that provide opportunities to make clear observations, infer and make connections with what is happening, as well as classify, measure, analyze and evaluate data.
Students will learn the importance of organizing information through the use of science notebooks where students document what they experience, any data they collect, and their thinking during the activity.
Our science instruction is broken down into two main modules, Energy and Environments.
During our Energy module, students explore electricity, learn about circuits, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each, and understand which materials conduct electricity. Students demonstrate their knowledge of these concepts through assessment and project-based learning opportunities, such as designing and constructing their own flashlight. A second topic introduced during this unit is magnetism and electromagnets. Through testing compasses, exploring the strength of magnetic attraction, creating visual magnetic fields, and building electromagnets and generators, students discover the phenomenon of magnets and interactions they have with materials and each other. Our final focus of this unit is energy transfer. Students observe and analyze data to determine how one form of energy can be transferred to another and document evidence seen that supports their ideas. Through well designed investigations, students discover what happens to energy when two objects collide, how variables affect one another, and use controlled experiments involving the transfer of potential energy into kinetic energy to test how mass and release position affect energy transfer.
The second module introduced in fourth grade is Environments. This module focuses on the way animals and plants interact with their environment and with each other. The driving question for the module deals with structure and function. Students design investigations to study environments, range of tolerance, and optimum conditions for growth and survival of specific organisms. Students conduct controlled experiments by incrementally changing specific environmental conditions and use data collected to develop and use models to understand the impact of changes to the environment. Students explore how animals use their sense of hearing and develop models for detecting and interpreting sound. They graph and interpret data from multiple experiments and develop explanations from evidence. Students gain experiences that will contribute to the understanding of patterns, cause and effect, system models, energy and matter, structure and function, and stability and change.
While participating in active investigations, online activities, outdoor experiences, and formative and benchmark assessments, students practice teamwork and interdependence, problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and applied understanding of past concepts to generate new hypotheses and conclusions. Our learning environment allows students to work and think like scientists and engineers.
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