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Grade 4 Curriculum

UE student and teacherHumanities: EL ELA

Units of Study
Four in-depth units of study structure the year. Each study builds on the concepts and skills developed in previous studies, allowing children to deepen their understanding and apply skills and concepts with creativity and innovation.

Over the course of the school year, teachers and children embark on four in-depth studies:

  1. Exploring Poetry
  2. The American Revolution
  3. The Fight for Women's Suffrage
  4. Call to Action: Talks to Inspire Change

The fourth grade year begins with a poetry unit using literature and informational text to introduce students to what inspires people to write. It is intentionally designed to encourage students to embrace a love of literacy and writing. They analyze the poems to determine a theme and to identify characteristics of poetry in order to effectively summarize the poems.  Students move from considering what has inspired the poets they have been reading about to write poetry, to thinking about what inspires them to write poetry.

In the second unit, the focus of student work requires them to consider how one's perspective influences his or her opinion. In this unit, students explore the importance of perspective in understanding world events, in this case through the lens of the American Revolution. Students read about different groups within the Loyalists and Patriots, reading informational texts to determine the main idea, analyze the overall structure of the text, and summarize the texts. Additionally, students read the historical fiction play Divided Loyalties to deepen their understanding of the Patriot and Loyalist perspectives.

By the third unit of study, students use literature and informational texts to introduce gender and racial inequality issues in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, and to recognize how the process of ratifying the 19th Amendment can teach us about how people were responding to gender and racial inequality at that time. Students connect their learning about the process of ratifying the 19th Amendment to their own lives as they focus on how students can make a difference and contribute to a better world.

As a final unit of study, fourth graders embrace civic engagement and 21st century communication skills.  Focusing on speaking and listening standards, students address conversation, collaboration, responding to media, and gaining information through listening and viewing and by identifying speakers’ points of view and evaluating their reasoning. They then address these ideas by preparing and presenting oral and media presentations. The Speaking and Listening Standards are closely related to preparation for participation in civic life. Combining informational text research with the Writing Standards and linked to the Language Standards’ expectations for making informed and effective choices in language use, students will end the year with an engaged and effective voice used in the shaping of their world. 

For more detailed information on the specifics of the Grade 4 EL ELA curriculum, click here.

Mathematics: Illustrative Math

In Grade 4, the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum is designed to progressively build upon foundational concepts. Each unit connects to and extends ideas from previous units, weaving a coherent mathematical narrative throughout the year. The Illustrative Math Curriculum uses a problem-based learning approach, ensuring that students not only master grade-level content but also develop critical, lifelong cognitive skills. This methodology deepens conceptual understanding, promotes active learning, and fosters skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and perseverance. The curriculum is designed to be student-centered, encouraging inquiry, collaboration, and active engagement with challenging real-world problems. 

Grade 4 students experience mathematics through 9 units:

Unit 1: Factors and Multiples

Students explore factors, multiples, and the classification of numbers as prime or composite. This unit builds on Grade 3 concepts of area, as students learn to relate the side lengths and area of a rectangle to factors and multiples, enhancing their multiplication and division skills.

Unit 2: Fraction Equivalence and Comparison

This unit extends students' grasp of fractions from Grade 3. They explore equivalent fractions, compare fractions using benchmarks like 1/2 and 1, and order fractions with various denominators.

Unit 3: Extending Operations to Fractions

This unit deepens students' understanding of fractions. They learn about the multiplication of fractions by whole numbers and add or subtract fractions with the same denominator. Concepts from earlier grades are used to develop these skills.

Unit 4: From Hundredths to Hundred-thousands

Students delve into decimal notations for fractions and extend their understanding of place value to very large numbers. They learn to represent, compare, and order decimals, and apply these concepts to real-world contexts.

Unit 5: Multiplicative Comparison and Measurement

In this unit, students learn to interpret and solve problems using multiplicative comparison. They also convert units within measurement systems, using multiplication as a tool for understanding the relationship between different units.

Unit 6: Multiplying and Dividing Multi-digit Numbers

Students expand their multiplication and division skills to multi-digit numbers in unit 6. This unit focuses on strategies like partial products and partial quotients, linking back to previous grades' concepts of multiplication and division.

Unit 7: Angles and Angle Measurement

Introducing geometric elements like points, lines, rays, and angles, this unit teaches students to measure angles and identify various types of angles in two-dimensional figures.

Unit 8: Properties of Two-dimensional Shapes

Students classify shapes based on their attributes, such as side lengths and angles. They explore symmetry and apply their understanding of geometry to solve problems related to perimeter and area.

Unit 9: Putting It All Together

This final unit reviews and consolidates the year's learning. Students revisit key concepts like fractions, multi-digit operations, and measurement, synthesizing their knowledge through engaging, real-world activities.

For more detailed information on the specifics of the Grade 4 Illustrative Math curriculum, click here.

Science: Amplify

The following unit summaries demonstrate how students engage in three-dimensional science learning to solve real-world questions and problems.

Energy Conversions: Blackout in Ergstown. Students take on the role of systems engineers for Ergstown, a fictional town that experiences frequent blackouts, and explore reasons why an electrical system may fail. They obtain information from science books and system models to learn about types of energy, energy sources, energy transfer, and energy conversion. They define engineering problems related to the town’s electrical system and design wind turbines using what they have learned about energy and matter.

Waves, Energy, and Information: Investigating How Dolphins Communicate. Students take on the role of marine scientists investigating how bottlenose dolphin mothers and their calves use patterns of sound to communicate across distances. Students ask questions about sound and gather evidence from physical models and a digital model. They investigate sound waves at the nanoscale and also investigate observable properties of sounds, such as volume and pitch. They use mathematical thinking to make sense of the wavelength and amplitude of waves.

Vision and Light: Investigating Animal Eyes. Students investigate why there is a decline in the number of Tokay geckos living in one area of a rainforest in the Philippines. They plan and conduct investigations and analyze data related to animal senses to figure out cause-and-effect relationships between environmental changes, the parts of an animal’s vision system, and the animal’s ability to see well. They make models and write explanations to share what they learn about how animals’ body structures perform functions related to senses and survival.

Earth’s Features: Mystery in Desert Rocks Canyon. In the role of geologists, students investigate a fossil and the geologic history of the area where the fossil was found. Students write scientific arguments about how the fossil formed and what the environment of that area was like in the past. They gather evidence for their arguments by finding patterns in rock layers, reading science books, and using digital and physical models. They analyze rock layers to draw conclusions about times of stability and times of change in the environments of a particular place.