St. Rose School
Science Curriculum Standards
June 2003

Grade 4

Physical Sciences

• Electricity and magnetism are related effects that have many useful applications in everyday life. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:
  
  
  • How to design and build simple series and parallel circuits using components such as wires, batteries, and bulbs
    
    
  • How to build a simple compass and use it to detect magnetic effects, including Earth's magnetic field
    
    
  • That all electric currents produce magnetic fields and how to build a simple electromagnet
    
    
  • The role of electromagnets in the construction of electric motors, electric generators, and simple devices such as doorbells and earphones
    
    
  • Electrically charged objects attract or repel each other
    
    
  • Magnets have two poles, labeled north and south, and like poles repel each other while unlike poles attract each other
    
    
  • Electrical energy can be converted to heat, light and motion

Life Sciences

• All organisms need energy and matter to live and grow. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:
  
  
  
  • Plants are the primary source of matter and energy entering most food chains
    
    
  • Producers and consumers (herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, and decomposers) are related in food chains and food webs, and may compete with each other for resources in an ecosystem
    
    
  • Decomposers, including many fungi, insects, and microorganisms recycle matter from dead plants and animals
    
    
• Living things depend on one another and their environment for survival. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:
  
  
  • Ecosystems can be characterized in terms of their living and nonliving components
    
    
  • For any particular environment, some kinds of plants and animals survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all
    
    
  • Many plants depend on animals for pollination and seed dispersal, while animals depend on plants for food and shelter
    
    
  • Most microorganisms do not cause disease and many are beneficial

Earth Sciences

• The properties of rocks and minerals reflect the processes that formed them. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:
  
  
  • How to differentiate among igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks by their properties and methods of formation (the rock cycle)
    
    
  • How to identify common rock-forming minerals (including quartz, calcite, feldspar, mica, and hornblende) and ore minerals using a table of diagnostic properties
    
    
• Waves, wind, water and ice shape and reshape the Earth's land surface. As a basis for understanding this concept, students know:
  
  
  • Some changes in the Earth are due to slow processes, such as erosion (weathering, transport, and deposition), and some changes are due to rapid processes, such as landslides, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes
    
    
  • Natural processes, including freezing/thawing and growth of roots, cause rocks to break down into smaller pieces.
    
    
  • Moving water erodes landforms, reshaping the land by taking it away in places and depositing it as pebbles, sand, silt, and mud in other places