Fourth grade: What your child should know
Keep tabs on your fourth-grader's development with this handy checklist.
No two kids are alike, especially when it comes to hitting developmental benchmarks. But it helps to have a rough idea of which academic and social skills your child should acquire at his or her grade level. Learn more about the fourth-grade classroom in these subject areas: reading, writing, math, science, technology, social studies, the arts, and physical education and health.
By the end of the year, you can expect your child to:
- Begin to make more decisions and engage in group decision-making
- Want to be part of a group
- Think independently and critically
- Have empathy
- Show a strong sense of responsibility
- Be able to memorize and recite facts, although he may not have a deep understanding of them
- Increase the amount of detail in drawings
- Work on research projects
- Write a structured paragraph with an introductory topic sentence, three supporting details, and a closing sentence that wraps up the main idea of the paragraph
- Use a range of strategies when drawing meaning from text, such as prediction, connections, and inference
- Understand cause-and-effect relationships
- Add and subtract decimals, and compare decimals and fractions
- Multiply multi-digit numbers by two-digit numbers
- Divide larger multi-digit numbers by one-digit numbers
- Find the area of two-dimensional shapes
- Have a greater awareness of fairness
