🔬 4th grade Science: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. ⚖️Particles & Mass

   Solids, liquids and gases at the particle level, how temperature changes particle speed, and conservation of mass (melting or dissolving doesn't change the total mass), with some adding of grams.

2. 🧪Mixtures & Solutions

   Telling pure substances from mixtures, mechanical mixtures from solutions, solutes and solvents, comparing concentration, and choosing separation methods like filtering, evaporation, magnets and distillation.

3. 🔥Thermal Energy

   Where heat comes from (the sun, fire, friction, food), how heat moves from warmer things to cooler things, and which materials are conductors or insulators, including reading simple experiment graphs.

4. 🧲Gravity & Magnets

   Gravity pulls objects toward Earth. Magnets have a north and south pole; like poles repel and unlike poles attract. Children learn which materials are magnetic and that non-contact forces get weaker with distance.

5. 🎳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.

6. 📡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.

7. 🔊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.

8. 🔌Circuits

   Conductors and insulators, what each part of a circuit does, and how series and parallel circuits behave and where each is used.

9. 💧Water World

   The water cycle, where our water comes from, and simple ways to save water and keep rivers clean.

10. 🌻Energy from the Sun

    Practices how plants get the materials they need for growth mostly from air and water, and how the energy in animals' food was once energy from the sun.

11. 🐕Traits & Variation

    Practices how plants and animals inherit traits from their parents, how traits vary within a family, and how the environment can change traits like size or health.

12. 🌵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.

13. 🌓Seasons & Moon Phases

    Practices reading data to find and predict patterns in the seasons (temperature and hours of daylight through the year) and in the Moon's appearance as it goes through its phases about every month.

14. 🌦️Weather or Climate?

    Practices telling weather (conditions on one day) from climate (the usual pattern over many years), using Texas examples: the dry, sunny climate of far West Texas and the humid climate of the Gulf Coast.

15. ⚡Texas Energy Resources

    Practices renewable and nonrenewable resources and their advantages and disadvantages, why energy matters to modern life, how conservation and recycling help, and the properties of rocks (pores and spaces) that let oil, gas and groundwater be stored underground. Uses Texas examples such as West Texas wind farms and oil and gas fields.

16. 🪨Weathering, Erosion & Fossils

    Practices slow changes to Earth's surface from weathering, erosion and deposition by water, wind and ice, and what rock layers and fossils (including common Texas fossils such as sea shells in limestone) say about past environments.

17. 🍂Food Webs & Decomposers

    Practices how matter cycles and energy flows through food webs, including the roles of the Sun, producers, consumers and decomposers, with Texas examples such as prairie grasses, jackrabbits and coyotes.