• Science Grade 4

    Scope and Sequence: 
    SCIENCE

    FOURTH GRADE Updated 2021

    **Elem Science in NHPS uses kits that rotate among schools.

    Check with each school for Rotation Details.                              

    Science Grade 4

    Concepts

    • Develop and explain multiple models of organisms’ life cycles: including birth, growth, reproduction, death.
    • Analyze and interpret data and evidence how organisms inherit traits from parents and how variation in those traits may influence their survival.
    • Construct an argument based on evidence from the past about how factors, such as climate, may affect how organisms survive.
    • Build and test a solution designed to keep an animal safe when the environment changes.
    • Collect and analyze detailed numerical data about weather conditions of the past and present to predict and forecast patterns and events.
    • Analyze climates around the world, and factors influencing climate changes, and use data to predict future events.
    • Investigate how unbalanced and balanced contact forces affect the patterns of motion in objects, including repeating motion, such as pendulums.
    • Use evidence of non-contact forces affecting motion (such as magnetism) to build a device that solves a motion problem

    Skills

    • Make observations about demonstrations, experiments and phenomena.
    • Form questions and wonderings about phenomena using observations and prior knowledge.
    • Ask questions about others’ explanations.
    • Use appropriate tools to make measurements and collect numerical data.
    • Plan and conduct cause/effect investigations that are “fair tests”.
    • Explain safety and ethical impacts of science investigations and solutions.
    • Design and refine visual or physical models that explain science events.
    • Display data using visual representations, including tables and graphs.
    • Connect data to appropriate explanations.
    • Construct and defend explanations about science concepts based on evidence.
    • Communicate with others about science claims and flaws in reasoning based on evidence
    • Use appropriate science vocabulary when communicating about science events.
    • Relate the use of science and technology to both causes of societal problems and possible solutions.
    • Design multiple solutions to real-life problems, and be able to improve them based on results.

    Science How You Can Help Your Child

    • Visit together, observe together, wonder together, think together, tinker together and most importantly, talk together!
    • Be positive about science learning. Don’t ever say science (or math) is “hard”!
    • Encourage perseverance. Often in science/math there is not an answer immediately, it takes time and effort.
    • Be positive about your child being curious about the world and taking time to “figure things out” by predicting, talking, investigating, not just “learn about” by looking up an answer.
    • Encourage students to develop and test their own understandings and explanations of the world.
    • Encourage exploration of objects around the house (movement, light, sound, heat), the world outside (sky, weather, trees, yard, the earth), living things (humans, animals, plants) and technology (cars, TVs, machines).
    • Encourage use of measurement tools at home (hand lens, rulers, thermometers, scales).
    • Encourage use of math, especially statistics in solving problems and analyzing data.
    • Help your child investigate the wide variety of careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
    • Use and visit local resources (museums, parks, family nights, science programs/events at Yale, other places).

    FOURTH GRADE NGSS Standards By Quarter  

     

    DETAILED GRADE BY GRADE OVERVIEW WITH NextGenerationScience Standards per Grade/Course and Quarter