| FOURTH GRADE |
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Physical Sciences
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Standard
1.
Electricity
and magnetism are related effects that have many useful applications in
everyday life. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:
a. How to design and build simple series
and parallel circuits using components such as wires, batteries, and bulbs.
b. How to build a simple compass and use it to detect magnetic effects,
including Earth's magnetic field.
c. Electric currents produce magnetic fields and how to build a simple
electromagnet.
d. The role of electromagnets in the construction of electric motors,
electric generators, and simple devices such as doorbells and earphones.
e. Electrically charged objects attract or repel each other.
f. Magnets have two poles, labeled north and south, and like poles
repel each other while unlike poles attract each other.
g. Electrical energy can be converted to heat, light and motion.
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Life Sciences
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Standard
2.
All organisms need
energy and matter to live and grow. As a basis for understanding this concept,
students know:
a. Plants are the primary source of matter
and energy entering most food chains.
b. Producers and consumers (herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, and
decomposers) are related in food chains and food webs, and may compete
with each other for resources in an ecosystem.
c. Decomposers, including many fungi, insects, and microorganisms,
recycle matter from dead plants and animals.
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Standard
3.
Living organisms
depend on one another and on their environment for survival. As a basis
for understanding this concept, students know:
a. Ecosystems can be characterized in terms
of their living and nonliving components.
b. For any particular environment, some kinds of plants and animals
survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
c. Many plants depend on animals for pollination and seed dispersal,
while animals depend on plants for food and shelter.
d. Most microorganisms do not cause disease and many are beneficial.
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Earth Sciences
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Standard
4.
The properties
of rocks and minerals reflect the processes that formed them. As a basis
for understanding this concept, students know:
a. How to differentiate among igneous, sedimentary,
and metamorphic rocks by their properties and methods of formation (the
rock cycle).
b. How to identify common rock-forming minerals (including quartz,
calcite, feldspar, mica, and hornblende) and ore minerals using a table
of diagnostic properties.
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Standard
5.
Waves, wind, water,
and ice shape and reshape the Earth's land surface. As a basis for understanding
this concept, students know:
a. Some changes in the Earth are due to
slow processes, such as erosion, and some changes are due to rapid processes,
such as landslides, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes.
b. Natural processes, including freezing/thawing and growth of roots,
cause rocks to break down into smaller pieces.
c. Moving water erodes landforms, reshaping the land by taking it
away from some places and depositing it as pebbles, sand, silt, and mud
in other places (weathering, transport, and deposition).
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Investigation
and Experimentation
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Standard
6.
Scientific
progress is made by asking meaningful questions and conducting careful
investigations. As a basis for understanding this concept, and to address
the content the other three strands, students should develop their own
questions and perform investigations. Students will:
a. Differentiate observation from inference
(interpretation), and know that scientistsí explanations come partly from
what they observe and partly from how they interpret their observations.
b. Measure and estimate weight, length, or volume of objects.
c. Formulate predictions and justify predictions based on cause
and effect relationships.
d. Conduct multiple trials to test a prediction and draw conclusions
about the relationships between results and predictions.
e. Construct and interpret graphs from measurements.
f. Follow a set of written instructions for a scientific
investigation.
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