What's So Great about Fourth Grade?


Book Description

A lie from his brainy best friend threatens to bar Mark from playing baseball for his fourth grade team.




What Your First Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated)


Book Description

Give your child a smart start with the revised and updated What Your First Grader Needs to Know What will your child be expected to learn in the first grade? How can you help him or her at home? How can teachers foster active, successful learning in the classroom? This book answers these all-important questions and more, offering the specific shared knowledge that hundreds of parents and teachers across the nation have agreed upon for American first graders. Featuring a new Introduction, filled with opportunities for reading aloud and fostering discussion, this first-grade volume of the acclaimed Core Knowledge Series presents the sort of knowledge and skills that should be at the core of a challenging first-grade education. Inside you’ll discover • Favorite poems—old and new, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and “Thirty Days Hath September” • Beloved stories—from many times and lands, including a selection of Aesop’s fables, “Hansel and Gretel,” “All Stories Are Anansi’s,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and more • Familiar sayings and phrases—such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Practice makes perfect” • World and American history and geography—take a trip down the Nile with King Tut and learn about the early days of our country, including the story of Jamestown, the Pilgrims, and the American Revolution • Visual arts—fun activities plus reproductions of masterworks by Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others • Music—engaging introductions to great composers and music, including classical music, opera, and jazz, as well as a selection of favorite children’s songs • Math—a variety of activities to help your child learn to count, add and subtract, solve problems, recognize geometrical shapes and patterns, and learn about telling time • Science—interesting discussions of living things and their habitats, the human body, the states of matter, electricity, our solar system, and what’s inside the earth, plus stories of famous scientists such as Thomas Edison and Louis Pasteur




What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated)


Book Description

Give your child a smart start with the revised and updated What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know How can you help your child at home? This book answers that important question and more, offering the specific shared knowledge that thousands of parents and teachers across the nation have agreed upon for American fourth graders. Featuring full-color illustrations throughout, a bolder, easier-to-follow format, and a thoroughly updated curriculum, What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know is designed for parents and teachers to enjoy with children. Hundreds of thousands of students have benefited from the Core Knowledge Series. This edition, featuring a new Introduction, gives today’s generation of fourth graders the advantage they need to make progress in school and establish an approach to learning that will last a lifetime. Inside you’ll discover • Favorite poems—old and new, from the familiar classic “Paul Revere’s Ride” to Langston Hughes’s “Dreams” • Literature—from around the world, including African and Chinese folktales, excerpts from beloved novels, and condensed versions of popular classics such as Gulliver’s Travels and “Rip Van Winkle” • Learning about language—the basics of written English, including grammar, punctuation, parts of speech, synonyms and antonyms, plus an introduction to common English sayings and phrases • World and American history and geography—explore world and American history, including creation of a constitutional government and early presidents and politics • Visual arts—a broad spectrum of art from around the world, including African masks, Islamic architecture, Chinese calligraphy, and great American painters—featuring full-color reproductions • Music—understanding and appreciating music, from the basics of musical notation to the orchestra, plus great composers and sing-along lyrics for such favorites as “Auld Lang Syne” and “Waltzing Matilda” • Math—challenging lessons ranging from fractions and decimals to understanding graphs, making change, square roots, and the metric system • Science—discover the wonders of the human body and its systems, learn about electricity, atoms, chemistry, geology, and meteorology, plus concise biographies of some of the great scientists of our time




Speaking of Fourth Grade


Book Description

Fourth grade is ground zero in the fierce debates about education reform in America. It's when kids (well, some of them) make the shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn,” and tomes have been written about the fourth-grade year by educators, administrators, philosophers, and pundits. Now, in a fascinating and groundbreaking book, Inda Schaenen adds the voices of actual fourth-grade kids to the conversation. Schaenen, a journalist turned educator, spent a year traveling across the state of Missouri, the geographical and spiritual center of the country, visiting fourth-grade classrooms of every description: public, private, urban, rural, religious, charter. Speaking of Fourth Grade looks at how our different approaches to education stack up against one another and chronicles what kids at the heart of our great, democratic education experiment have to say about “What Makes a Good Teacher” and “What Makes a Good Student,” as well as what they think about the Accelerated Reader programs that dominate public school classrooms, high-stakes testing, and the very purpose of school in the first place. A brilliant and original work at the intersection of oral history, sociology, and journalism, Speaking of Fourth Grade offers unique insight into the personal consequences of national education policy. The voices of the children in Speaking of Fourth Grade will stay with readers—parents, teachers, and others—for many years to come.




Every Child is a Winner


Book Description

Encourages adults to be involved in the lives of the children around them to ensure every child develops his or her full potential in Christ.




Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing


Book Description

Living with his little brother, Fudge, makes Peter Hatcher feel like a fourth grade nothing. Whether Fudge is throwing a temper tantrum in a shoe store, smearing smashed potatoes on walls at Hamburger Heaven, or scribbling all over Peter's homework, he's never far from trouble. He's a two-year-old terror who gets away with everything—and Peter's had enough. When Fudge walks off with Dribble, Peter's pet turtle, it's the last straw. Peter has put up with Fudge too long. How can he get his parents to pay attention to him for a change?




Fourth Grade Rats


Book Description

A fast, fun, friendship read from the Newbery-award winning author of , Maniac Magee. Fourth graders are tough. They aren't afraid of spiders. They say no to their moms. They push first graders off the swings. And they never, ever cry.Suds knows that now that he's in fourth grade, he's supposed to be a rat. But whenever he tries to act like one, something goes wrong. Can Suds's friend Joey teach him to toughen up...or will Suds remain a fourth grade wimp?




Yardsticks


Book Description

Describes the common intellectual and emotional characteristics of children ages four to fourteen year by year so that teachers and parents can better meet their needs.




World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements


Book Description

“His ideas will help anyone who has the courage to understand that a real education must go beyond filling in circles on a standardized test form.” —Rafe Esquith, New York Times-bestselling author of Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire Can playing a game lead to world peace? If it’s John Hunter’s World Peace Game, it just might. In Hunter’s classroom, students take on the roles of presidents, tribal leaders, diplomats, and military commanders. Through battles and negotiations, standoffs and summits, they strive to resolve a sequence of many-layered, interconnected scenarios, from nuclear proliferation to tribal warfare. Now, Hunter shares inspiring stories from over thirty years of teaching the World Peace Game, revealing the principles of successful collaboration that people of any age can apply. He offers not only a forward-thinking report from the frontlines of American education, but also a generous blueprint for a world that bends toward cooperation rather than conflict. In this deeply hopeful book, a visionary educator shows us what the future of education can be. “The World Peace Game devised by fourth-grade teacher Hunter has spread from a classroom in 1978 to a documentary, a TED Talk, the Pentagon, and now finally a book, in which he describes the ways his students have solved political and ecological crises that still loom large in the world of adults . . . Hunter’s optimism is infectious.” —Publishers Weekly “Inspired, breath-of-fresh-air reading.” — Kirkus Reviews “Hunter proves the value of ‘slow teaching’ in this important, fascinating, highly readable resource for educators and parents alike.” — Booklist




Fourth Grade Fairy


Book Description

When fairy-godmother-in-training Willow's wish to attend a human school comes true, she finds getting along with humans to be harder than she expected, but her newly-acquired magical talent makes it easy to collaborate with animals.