What your 4th grader should have learned

Did your child master the skills they need to be ready for next year? Here’s a rough idea of the academic and social skills that kids acquire in fourth grade. If your child hasn’t mastered some of these skills, don’t worry. No two kids are alike, especially when it comes to hitting developmental benchmarks. Choose a few to practice this summer, but be sure to keep things low key, both for you and for your child. The most important outcomes of summer learning are that your child enjoy learning and taking on new challenges.

By the end of 4th grade, kids should be able to:

• Show increasing ability to participate in group decisions.
• Memorize and recall facts.
• Take notes on what they read.
• Incorporate research from books, articles, or the internet into their projects.
• Write a paragraph with an introductory topic sentence, three supporting details, and a closing sentence that wraps up the main idea of the paragraph.
• Type one page (or more) in one sitting.
• Name all 50 states and their capitals. (Check out this song for help.)
• Read and interpret maps.
• Know key facts about their home state, including historical and cultural information about the Native American tribes have lived in that region. (Check out our History books for 4th graders.)
• Add and subtract decimals, and compare decimals and fractions. (Get some practice working with fractions.)
• Multiply a multiple-digit number by a one-digit number and multiply two two-digit numbers. (Get some extra multiplication practice.)
• Divide a multiple-digit number by one-digit number to get whole number answers with remainders. (Get extra practice doing division with remainders.)
• Find the area of two-dimensional shapes. (Get extra practice finding the area of squares and rectangles.)

Find out more about your fourth grader and reading, writing, math, science, social studies, the arts, and physical education.