Grade 4 · Science

Grade 4 science

Grade 4 science connects things: animals in a food web, sound travelling through air, gears turning other gears, rocks breaking into soil. Here is what it covers, where kids usually get stuck, and one way to help.

What your child learns this year

Topics differ by province and state, but most grade 4 classes cover several of these:

  • Habitats and communities. Food chains and webs, and how living things depend on one another.
  • Light and sound. How light travels and reflects, and how sound is made and travels.
  • Pulleys and gears. Simple machines that change the size or direction of a force.
  • Rocks and minerals. How rocks form, and how weathering and erosion shape the land.
  • Energy. How energy moves from place to place: in motion, light, sound and heat.

Where kids usually get stuck

  1. 1Thinking only one animal is affected when another disappears. A change travels through the whole food web: to what the missing animal ate, and to what ate it.
  2. 2Thinking sound can travel through empty space. Sound needs air, water or something solid to move through. In space, there is nothing to carry it.
  3. 3Mixing up rocks and minerals. A mineral is one natural substance, like quartz. Most rocks are several minerals stuck together.

One of Pip's tricks

Take one out, follow arrows

Use it when predicting what happens to a food web when one plant or animal disappears.

  1. Find the living thing that is removed.
  2. Follow the arrows into it: what it ate gets eaten less, so its numbers may go up.
  3. Follow the arrows out of it: what ate it loses food, so its numbers may go down.
  4. Check for other arrows: an animal that has other foods is hurt less.

Watch it work. In a pond, frogs eat insects and herons eat frogs. If all the frogs disappear, what happens to the insects at first? The arrow into the frogs comes from the insects, so with no frogs, fewer insects get eaten and their numbers go up. The arrow out of the frogs goes to the herons, who lose some of their food.

Why it works: every arrow in a food web is a link where one living thing feeds another, so a change in one population travels along the arrows to everything connected to it.

Try three

Tap a choice to see if it is right, with the reason.

  1. 1.In grass → rabbit → fox, all the rabbits disappear. What happens to the foxes first?

  2. 2.A pond has algae → small fish → heron. The herons leave. What happens to the small fish at first?

  3. 3.Two astronauts stand on the Moon, where there is no air. Can they hear each other shout without radios?

How Sparkpip fits in

Pip, Sparkpip's tutor, works through questions like these with your child one small step at a time, using ways of thinking like the one above.

Start freeSee how it works

Your curriculum

Sparkpip is built on the grade 4 science curriculum for your province or state. The official pages:

Also: Grade 3 science · Grade 5 science · Grade 4 math · Grade 4 English