🔬 4th grade Science: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🎳Energy, Speed & Collisions

   Practices how an object's speed relates to its energy, what happens to energy when objects collide, and devices that change energy from one form to another.

2. 🔋Energy on the Move

   Practices energy sources, how energy moves from a source to an object or living thing to cause action, and how people use their senses to detect heat, light and sound.

3. 💡Forms of Energy

   Kinetic and potential energy, how energy changes from one form to another, and why some energy always escapes as heat, light or sound.

4. 📡Waves & Codes

   Practices how waves have amplitude and wavelength and can make objects move, and how patterns like codes, flashes and digital signals carry information.

5. 🔊Sound

   Vibrations and sound waves, pitch and volume, how sound travels through different materials but not through empty space, echoes and absorbing sound, how we hear, and how noise and sound devices affect people and animals.

6. 💡Light

   Natural and artificial light, things that make light and things that reflect it, shadows, transparent, translucent and opaque materials, mirrors, refraction, and how light technology affects people and wildlife.

7. 🌵Built to Survive: Plants

   Practices how the structures and functions of plants help them survive in their environment: waxy leaves and spines that save water, deep or wide roots, thick stems that store water, and leaves shaped for sun or shade, with Texas plants such as prickly pear, mesquite, live oak and bald cypress.

8. 🦊Adaptations & Habitats

   Practices habitats, body and behavior adaptations, camouflage, migration and hibernation, and how plants and animals rely on each other (pollination, seed dispersal, soil nutrients).

9. 🦇Sense & Respond

   How people, animals and plants sense and respond to their environment: the nervous system, reflexes, special animal senses and plant responses to light, gravity and touch.

10. ⛈️Weather and the Water Cycle

    How the Sun, air, water and land interact to cause daily weather, the water cycle, tools for measuring weather, and why long-term forecasting is hard.

11. 🏞️Wind, Water, Ice

    Children learn how wind, water and ice change the landscape, how soil forms from rocks, and which natural events cause sudden changes.

12. 🌪️Earth Maps & Hazards

    Your child reads maps to find patterns in Earth's features and compares solutions that protect people from natural hazards, such as Alabama's tornadoes and hurricanes.

13. ⚡Energy Resources

    Your child sorts energy resources as renewable or nonrenewable and describes how using each affects the environment, with Alabama examples such as coal and river dams.

14. 🪨Rock Layers & Erosion

    Your child reads rock layers and fossils as clues to the past and explains how water, ice and wind wear land away.