Our enthusiastic fourth grade teachers welcome bright, young fourth graders who are eager to learn into their classrooms. This web page is intended to inform you of some general topics that apply to all fourth grade classes. For specific questions, please feel free to call us at Tekoppel, 435-8333.
Much of our math work in fourth grade is a review and extension of third grade mathematical concepts. An area of particular concern to us is basic math facts. We depend on the students having their addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts memorized so we may move into more advanced work with multiplication, division, and fractions. Many of our students still need much work in memorizing these facts. Please work on these at home with your child.
In Reading, we spend a lot of time doing just that - READING! We read to the children, they read silently, and they read orally. We feel this is the very best way for students to improve their reading skills. We do a lot of work with nonfiction text and how to use text features to glean information from that text about the main idea. In fiction, we work on plot, character, setting, theme, and conflict. In addition, we explore character traits, the importance of the theme, and summarizing the text. We work with nine reading strategies children can use to better understand what they are reading. We love reading at school and hope that you are reading with your child at home, too!
The emphasis in Social Studies is mainly on Indiana, both geography and history. You will be seeing a lot of work on these topics, and you may find learning about Indiana with your child to be an enjoyable activity. This year, we will be incorporating the Indiana Weekly Magazine and Time for Kids into our curriculum. In Science, we spend a lot of time in hands-on explorations and writing in our science notebooks. Students learn to work cooperatively with one another, ask questions, ponder thoughts, make predictions, and draw conclusions and reflect on their work.
Finally, we would like you to be aware of the wonderful learning experiences your child will receive by participating in our study trips. Throughout the year we will be exploring early settlements in Indiana and how they shaped our state. These trips include visiting New Harmony to learn about the early settlement and how people lived in the early 1800s, visiting to the Reitz Home where we study Victorian design, how early Evansville grew, and what contributions the Reitz family made to our community. We we will travel to Vincennes and the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial to learn more about the early foundation of our state and the childhood of our nation's sixteenth President. Finally, we have Vectren presentations, Purdue Character Program, and other exciting guests. We feel each of these valuable study trips and presentations offer excellent opportunities to help us reach the standards that the state of Indiana has set for our students in the areas of Social Studies, Science, and Language.