Phone: 314-771-2539

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Degrees and Certifications:

Ms. McFarland

Dear Parents, Guardians, and Scholars,

Congratulations: Your scholar is officially a member of the upper grades! As fourth graders, scholars deepen their skills to prepare for middle school. That being said, they still learn like elementary school students do. The content of most fourth grade curricula pushes students to think, analyze, and learn in more sophisticated and structured ways than they did in the lower grades.

In fourth grade, scholars learn how to deeply think about and make connections in new material, and grasp more complex concepts across all subjects. Fourth graders are encouraged to be more independent in how they learn, and depend less on their teacher's guidance. They research, plan, and revise their work more by themselves — setting the foundation to be lifelong, self-starting learners.

The goals for fourth grade scholars include demonstrating increased responsibility for learning, managing time well, setting appropriate achievement goals, and beginning to understand their own learning styles. Fourth graders, as lifelong learners and problem solvers, are expected to be active and critical thinkers while working cooperatively with their peers.

 

 

  • What to expect this year:

     

    To build reading skills, your fourth grader will:

    Identify the main idea of what has been read, explaining how the author used facts and evidence to back up the text.

    Compare writing from different cultures.

    Understand information presented in drawings, timelines, charts and other non-text formats.

    Take notes and organize facts; create oral and written reports using the information.

    Participate in class discussions about specific questions and share their own ideas and understandings in relation to the discussion.

    Use dialogue and descriptive language in stories to show a character’s inner life.

    Read with a higher level of fluency, pacing and expression.

    Read grade-level texts with accurate comprehension.

    Apply comprehension strategies to literary and informational texts.

    Utilize root words, prefixes, suffixes, and context clues to analyze unfamiliar words.

    Formulate multiple paragraph pieces that focus on a specific purpose or audience.

    Write chronological pieces: pieces focusing on cause and effect and pieces that draw from personal experience.

    Understand subject-verb agreement and use it correctly.

    Know basic punctuation and use it correctly.

    Define idioms and adages.

    Research, plan, and revise their writing independently.

    Identify and refer to the different parts of poems and plays, such as verses, settings, and characters.

    Interpret and connect information from illustrations, graphs, charts, or other sources related to the text.

    Identify, compare, and contrast different perspectives from which texts are written (for example, first and third person).

    Compare and contrast the way different texts address the same issue, theme, or topic.

    Makes connections between people, events, or important ideas in a text.

      

     

  • To build writing skills, your fourth grader will:

    Write opinion pieces that express a point of view; have an introduction, a conclusion, reasons, and facts to support the opinion; and group together related ideas.

    Write informational pieces that present information on a topic, use facts and details, and group together related topics; provide introductions and conclusions in these pieces.

    Write narrative pieces that use specific details, descriptions, and dialogue to convey a real event; include an introduction and conclusion in each piece.

    Plan, revise, and edit their writing.

    Use technology to publish, research, and communicate with others under the proper guidance of the teacher.

    Type with a beginner’s accuracy and ability (for example, types one page of text within one sitting).

    Complete research projects by taking notes, organizing them, and presenting them; listing the texts and resources used.

    Write for both long (over weeks) and shorter (one sitting or a couple of days) periods of time.

  • To build math skills, your fourth grader will:

    Use place value understanding and properties of operations to perform multi-digit arithmetic with numbers up to one million.

    Extend understanding of fraction equivalence and ordering.  (Limit denominators to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 100.)

    Extend understanding of operations on whole numbers to fraction operations.

    Understand decimal notation for fractions, and compare decimal fractions.  (Denominators of 10 or 100.)

    Use the four operations with whole numbers to solve problems.

    Work with factors and multiples.

    Generate and analyze patterns.

    Classify 2-dimensional shapes by properties of their lines and angles.

    Understand the concepts of angle and measure angles.

    Solve problems involving measurement and conversion of measurements from a larger unit to a smaller unit.

    Represent and analyze data.