Science

About this course

Fourth grade drops the sweeping survey format and gives each topic a unit of its own. Your student studies ecosystems and niches across forest, ocean, desert, and freshwater settings; plant life cycles, pollination, and seed dispersal; animal adaptations including camouflage, mimicry, migration, and hibernation; food chains, predators and prey, and energy flow; seven body systems and how they work together; minerals, the three rock types, the rock cycle, and fossils; physical and chemical weathering, erosion, and deposition; the atmosphere, air pressure, wind, severe weather, weather instruments, and reading a weather map; the water cycle from evaporation through groundwater; the sun, planets, moon phases, rotation, and seasons; light and sound as forms of energy, including reflection, refraction, pitch, and volume; and finally static electricity, circuits, conductors, magnets, and electromagnets.

There are 108 lessons in 12 units, most running 8 or 10 lessons and ending with a review lesson that pulls the unit together. Each lesson is planned for about 30 minutes and follows the same shape: a short prayer, a wonder question, the teaching, an observation or experiment, and a record-and-share step, then a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself. The assigned homework is now a short written paragraph rather than a drawing, so your student is expected to put ideas into sentences.

The writing is aimed at your student, not at you, and the parent note asks you to encourage independent work while staying nearby for questions. It carries real technical vocabulary and expects it to stick: isobars, occluded fronts, station models, chromatophores, diffuse reflection, cementation. Listed materials are only pencil, paper, and crayons, and the activities lean on observation and drawing rather than kits. Coming in, your student should read comfortably on their own and be able to write a short paragraph. Content is taught from a creation perspective, and the earth science material is explicit about it: the rock cycle lesson teaches that geological change can be rapid and attributes much of the sedimentary layering to Noah's Flood.

What the course covers

• Ecosystems, habitats, niches, and organism interactions
• Plant life cycles, pollination, seed dispersal, and photosynthesis
• Animal adaptations: camouflage, mimicry, migration, and hibernation
• Food chains, food webs, and energy flow
• The skeletal, muscular, digestive, circulatory, respiratory, nervous, and immune systems
• Minerals, rock types, fossils, weathering, erosion, and deposition
• The atmosphere, wind, severe weather, instruments, and weather maps
• The water cycle, groundwater, and water conservation
• The solar system, moon phases, and Earth's rotation and revolution
• Light, sound, static electricity, circuits, and magnetism

What your student will be able to do

• Diagram a food web and label producers, consumers, and decomposers
• Classify a rock as igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic and place it in the rock cycle
• Read a weather map's isobars, fronts, and station models to forecast conditions
• Explain how each body system works and how two of them depend on each other
• Distinguish reflection from refraction and predict what light will do
• Write a short paragraph explaining a science concept in their own words

Scope and sequence

All 12 units of Science for Grade 4, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 108 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 108 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.