Grade 4 Scope

How to read this scope

Each unit_id in the frontmatter resolves to a unit file under units/. start_day/end_day map the unit onto the 180-day school year; the list is a continuous sequence from day 1 to day 180 with no gaps or overlaps. domain and pillar name the primary domain(s) and pillar(s) each unit serves. domain_weighting expresses the intended balance of instructional time across the ten domains, in percent of the year. lesson_count counts the core lessons; the days between lessons carry flex time, assessment, integration, and celebration. assessment_plan describes how a child’s growth is seen and recorded at this level.

Year at a glance

The Grade 4 year is a spiral that deepens what Grade 3 began. It opens inward. Feelings in Full Color & My Growing Self builds on Grade 3’s mixed feelings and changing feelings: now children describe the strength of a feeling — a little, some, or a lot — and what each level feels like in the body, recognize complex feelings such as jealousy, guilt, and pride and connect them to real situations, explain how their interests, abilities, and experiences shape who they are, and describe a family or cultural tradition and how it connects them to a larger community. They plan the several steps of a goal, try the plan, and adjust when a step does not work, and practice self-control by staying with a task or rule even when it is hard to keep going. My Body at Work & at Rest then reads the body with new precision: how heartbeat, breathing, and warmth change with activity and rest and why, noticing and respecting the many ways bodies sense and move — including people who use aids or assistive tools — and learning the rules of simple cooperative games and sports while playing fairly, applying balance, agility, and coordination to adapted and seated versions of movement alike.

Listening, Perspective & Belonging turns outward into the practice of care. Where Grade 3 learned to take turns and use “I” statements, Grade 4 learns to actively listen — paraphrasing what a partner said before responding — and to negotiate a fair solution to a disagreement with a peer with only minimal adult help. They explain why a person might feel the way they do using clues about what happened, compare their own point of view with a classmate’s on the same event, identify a role they can play in their class or neighborhood and carry it out, describe how communities welcome newcomers and why belonging matters, organize a small act of care, and explain the difference between sharing for the common good and taking more than one’s share. The heart of the year is given to the two great tools of school, now working with real independence. Reading, Writing & Many Languages builds fluency and comprehension: summarizing the main idea and key details of an oral presentation, presenting a short talk with clear volume and pace, using context clues and word parts such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes to figure out unfamiliar words, comparing and contrasting themes, characters, or ideas within and across two texts, writing a narrative, informative, or opinion piece organized into paragraphs, and carrying a piece through the whole writing process — plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish — on their own. They learn that languages belong to families and share roots, and show respect for a peer’s language by learning and saying their name and a few words correctly — always in the learner’s home language first, with multilingualism held as wealth. Numbers, Patterns, Shapes & Data grows from Grade 3’s place value to 1,000 into place value to 1,000,000, multi-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division checked by estimation, number and shape patterns that follow a given rule, a letter or symbol standing for an unknown number in a simple equation, points, lines, line segments, rays, and angles with shapes classified by them, the area and perimeter of rectangles by formula, converting measurements within a system to solve problems with distance, time, volume, and money, and making and interpreting line plots with fractional measurements — mathematics as sense-making with real things, drawn from many traditions, for everyone.

From there the year looks out at the world. Controlled Experiments & the Living World turns wonder into a careful, repeated test: measuring with tools such as a ruler, scale, thermometer, or magnifier and recording with units, comparing results across repeated trials and explaining why repeating a test matters, describing how animals’ body parts and behaviors help them survive, how living and nonliving things in an ecosystem depend on one another, how energy moves from one place or object to another as heat, sound, and light and is never destroyed, building a simple circuit and explaining conductors and insulators, the water cycle, and how fossils and rock layers give clues about Earth’s long history. Making, Music & Movement gives craft to the imagination — depth and space in art through overlapping, size, and placement, simple notation read and played, a dance or movement form from another culture, a character built with voice, body, and a simple prop, and design for a specific user with feedback to improve it — while meeting the arts of other cultures as living traditions to honor with respectful questions, never as specimens. Healthy, Safe & Strong returns to the body with growing independence — reading simple nutrition information on food packages to make a healthier choice, honoring the many ways families and cultures eat healthy foods, the basic safety rules for home, road, water, and weather, and safe, respectful behavior online, including not sharing private information and knowing where to get help.

The final third steps into the wider human story. People, Places & Long Ago places events from two different places on a dated timeline and compares what was happening at the same time, compares daily life in an earlier society with life today, describes a knowledge tradition — herbal medicine, star navigation, or oral history — and how it is kept and passed on, compares how two cultures explain the same natural event through story and observation, uses maps to locate landforms and bodies of water and how they shaped settlement, how the environment shapes how people get food, water, and shelter and how people change it, how rules and leaders make decisions and what people can do when a decision is unfair, and a peaceful way people have resisted unfair treatment. Rights, Fairness & Our Shared Rules weighs two reasons for a choice and decides which is stronger, names what a value is and one value of one’s own, explains dignity and where it is honored or denied, evaluates whether a rule or practice is fair to everyone it affects, compares how communities decide and choose leaders with one other place in the world, works on a shared project dividing tasks fairly, and practices active listening, “I” statements, and restorative practice — repairing harm rather than only punishing. Tools, Media & Our Earth Home meets the idea of design, compares two tools for the same job, identifies the author, purpose, and audience of a message, checks a claim against a second source, describes an ecosystem and the jobs of producers, consumers, and decomposers, follows what happens to trash and the “reduce, reuse, recycle” order, and investigates how one human action can help or harm a local place — with a first, real sense of what we can do. The year closes by gathering all of it together in All of Me, All of Us, celebrating each whole person and the caring community, and looking ahead to Grade 5.

Throughout, the four pillars are interwoven. Intellectual awareness (P3) carries the most weight — reading toward chapter books and non-fiction comprehension, multi-digit number work, and repeated, measured experiments are the year’s central work — but emotional and social awareness (P1) and physical and somatic awareness (P2) remain strong, for a known, cared-for, and capable body-and-self is still the ground all formal learning stands on. Contextual and ecological awareness (P4) keeps growing: history moves toward dated timelines, comparison, and peaceful resistance; civics toward rights, dignity, fairness, and repairing harm; and ecology toward ecosystems, the jobs of living things, and the first responsibilities of stewardship. No high-stakes tests anywhere: a child’s growth is seen through reading aloud, writing, number work with real things, measured and repeated tests, and a portfolio of what they make, say, and do.