🔬 4th grade Science: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🦇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.

2. 💡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.

3. 🔊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.

4. 🦊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).

5. 🔋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.

6. 🎳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.

7. 📡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.

8. 🪨Rocks, Layers & Erosion

   Practices reading rock layers and fossils as clues to how a landscape changed, and how weathering and erosion by water, ice, wind and plants shape the land, with New York's Finger Lakes, Niagara Falls and Letchworth gorge as examples.

9. 🌊Maps & Natural Hazards

   Practices reading maps of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes and ocean features to find patterns, and comparing solutions that reduce the impacts of earthquakes, eruptions, floods and storm surges, such as the dunes and sea walls that protect New York's coast.

10. ⚡Energy Resources

    Practices how energy and fuels come from natural resources like moving water, wind, sunlight, oil and gas, and how using them affects the environment, with examples from New York's hydropower at Niagara Falls and wind farms off Long Island.

11. 🛠️Engineering Design

    Practices the steps engineers use: defining a problem with criteria (what the design must do) and constraints (limits such as cost, time and materials), comparing several possible solutions, and planning fair tests that find a design's failure points so it can be improved.