Category: Grade 4
Showing 4 topics.
4-ESS2-2: Patterns of Earth’s Features – Analyzing Maps to Understand Tectonic and Geological Patterns
Students analyze and interpret data from maps to describe patterns of Earth's features, including topographic maps of land and ocean floor, and maps of mountains, continental boundaries, volcanoes, and earthquakes. By identifying the striking spatial correlations among these features, students begin to develop the foundational understanding of plate tectonics that will be fully developed in middle school: that Earth's surface is broken into large moving plates whose boundaries are the sites of most of the planet's geological activity.
4-ESS3-2: Reducing the Impact of Natural Earth Processes – Generating and Comparing Engineering Solutions
Students generate and compare multiple solutions to reduce the impacts of natural Earth processes on humans. Moving beyond weather-related hazards studied in Grade 3, fourth graders now apply engineering design thinking to the full range of natural geological and hydrological processes including earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, generating and comparing solutions based on evidence and scientific understanding of how each hazard operates.
4-ESS1-1: Rock Formations and Fossils – Reading Earth’s History in Layers of Stone
Students identify evidence from patterns in rock formations and fossils in rock layers to support an explanation for changes in a landscape over time. Rock strata and the fossils preserved within them are Earth's own archive of its history, and fourth graders learn to read that archive as geologists do: by recognizing that layer sequences record time, that the organisms preserved in each layer tell us about the conditions that existed when those sediments were deposited, and that changes in the fossil record from layer to layer reveal how environments have changed across millions of years.
4-ESS2-1: Weathering and Erosion – Observing and Measuring How Water, Ice, Wind, and Plants Shape the Land
Students make observations and measurements to provide evidence of the effects of weathering or the rate of erosion by water, ice, wind, or vegetation. This investigation-centered standard moves fourth graders beyond simply knowing that weathering and erosion occur to actually measuring the variables that control how fast they happen, developing quantitative experimental thinking alongside a deeper understanding of the processes that continuously reshape Earth's surface.