Welcome to fourth grade!  Fourth grade is a fun and stimulating year for students.  You will be amazed at how they grow, learn, and mature over the year.  We wouldn’t be surprised if they are teaching you new things throughout the school year!  Fourth graders learn the importance of responsibility and integrity in their actions, words, and deeds.  Students will work a great deal in collaborative groups, and learn to work with others well to enhance their learning and engagement in class.  The fourth grade teachers are looking forward to an amazing and powerful year of learning!

Students will be exposed to many different reading genres throughout the school year. Students will continue to develop important reading skills such as questioning, predicting, making connections, drawing conclusions, making inferences, clarifying, determing importance, summarizing, and visualizing. Students will work in small guided reading groups, literature circles, and have the opportunity to read books of their choice. It is important for each student to read at least twenty minutes a night at home, too! Students will write a lot in fourth grade. They will be writing narratives, expository essays, and descriptive writing with a focus on sentence ideas, sentence fluency, voice, word choice, organization, and conventions.

Students will have a busy and challenging year in mathematics. Students will be learning conceptual math and problem solving. They will be taught and encouraged to use various strategies to solve mathematical problems. In regard to problem solving, students will be expected to solve problems with multiple steps and operations. Units of study for math include addition and subtraction computation, decimals and fractions, graphing, elapsed time, geometry, and multiplication and division computation.

Students have a fun year of science learning. They will study living systems (plants and animals), weather, electricity, and the solar system. There is not an SOL test in Science in fourth grade.

Fourth graders study Virginia History! They will explore the history of our state from 1607 until present day with an emphasis on the Native Virginians of our state, Jamestown, the Virginia Colony, American Revolution, Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and the economy then and now. Students will take an end-of-year SOL test on Virginia Studies.