Fourth grade at CHES requires our students to draw on the skills and strategies they have learned in school. School work becomes more challenging and more planning and organization is necessary. Rigor and relevance to our world play an important role.

Several leadership opportunities will arise for our fourth-graders. The Student Council Association is the student body government which organizes school events as well as service projects throughout the year as well as Buddy Classes with our Kindergarten and first graders are ways for our students to become involved.

Children’s Engineering projects are incorporated into the curriculum throughout the school year. These projects are hands-on activities which allow the students to use their knowledge of concepts learned as well as problem solving skills.

• Reading comprehension strategies include predicting, visualizing, questioning, determining importance, inference, clarifying, synthesizing, and making connections.
• Writing – improving upon organization, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions.
• Accelerated Reading Celebrations- fourth grade challenges students to read and obtain a certain number of AR points in order to participate in celebrations. This program has proven to be extremely beneficial in improving comprehension as well as fluency.

• Fourth grade – multi-step word problems, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimals, adding and subtracting fractions as well as comparing and simplifying fractions, geometry, probability, measurement, elapsed time.
• Fourth grade accelerated –multi-step word problems, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimals, graphing, adding and subtracting fractions, geometry, probability, measurement, elapsed time, perimeter, area, volume, and order of operations.

The standards for Virginia Studies allow students to develop a greater understanding of Virginia’s rich history, from the cultures of its native peoples and the founding of Jamestown to the present. Geographic, economic, and civic concepts are presented within this historical context. Students will develop the skills needed to analyze, interpret, and demonstrate knowledge of important events and ideas in our history, and will understand the contributions made by people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Students will use geographic tools to examine the influence of physical and cultural geography on Virginia history. Ideas that form the foundation for political institutions in Virginia and the United States also will be included as part of the story of Virginia.

Fourth-grade units include the scientific method, electricity, motion, interactions among the Earth, moon, and sun, plants and animals and their environments, weather phenomena and conditions. The importance of natural resources in Virginia is emphasized.