Fourth Grade Instructional Guidance

Each and every student comes to the classroom with a wealth of strengths and lived experiences along with specific developmental assets, and needs. These constitute the root that instruction should be informed by and grow from. Honoring these roots, cultivate an environment where your students can tap into their joy for learning and nurture it with their classmates. 

Support them to deeply engage in their learning by modeling, scaffolding, and providing ample opportunities to freely ask questions, openly explore and share their thinking, provide and use feedback, and ask for help when needed. Support each student to develop and demonstrate a sense of ownership for their own learning and that of their classmates - growing a sense of shared responsibility for academic and non-academic routines, procedures, and expectations throughout their fourth-grade experience.

There's an intense inner stirring in nine-year-olds as they become profoundly aware of the intricacies and subtleties of the world around them. This is a solemn age of intellectual stretching, wondering, arguing, questioning, and doubting--all signs of remarkable growth in these children's resilience, intellectual curiosity, maturing moral character, and capacity for independent thought. Nines impatiently question the ways adults have made the world--a world they begin to see they will have the power and responsibility to manage and to change.

Fairness begins to matter a great deal as nines take on the cognitive task of understanding ethical behavior at a new level. They have a  growing sense of peer importance and group solidarity. Nine is an age not only of growing peer identification but also of increasing self-definition - as such, they can be critical of both self and others. As nines approach test-taking or other tasks they find challenging, they prefer caution to risk. Support nines with modeling, role-playing, and many opportunities for practice so they can make the most of their growing intellectual capacities.

Ten-year-olds feel like they can take on just about anything and delight in every minute of it. During this sunny year, children love to play, to learn, and to relate to others. This is a time for consolidating the gains from their early years as they find comfort in themselves, their teachers, their parents, and even their siblings. Tens relax in childhood as they gather strength for the impending challenges of adolescence.