This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 4th grade Science content.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 4th Grade Science course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

Students will explain how various forces affect the motion of an object.
Students know that a magnet pulls on all things made of iron without touching them, and that this pulling can result in motion. Students know that a magnet attracts some metals, but not all of them. Students know that a magnet has a force field and poles that determine how a metal affected by the magnet will behave within its field.

Students will make a car move using the forces of magnets to turn around, go backwards, and drive along a path without touching it.

In this activity, students will investigate the history of magnets and explore some of the ways that we use magnets.

In this lesson, students discuss and demonstrate the internal structure of the magnet through a kinesthetic activity.

In this activity, students will discover the magnet's field where the magnet can exert its power to push or pull.

Students will be challenged to work with magnets to obtain metal objects located in glasses filled with water without getting their hands wet.

In this series of 4 experiments, students will investigate how magnets both attract and repel other magnets. Experiment 4 specifically focuses on how magnets affect motion. Probing questions, ideas for changing variables, assessment ideas and a language arts extension are included.

In this activity, students explore the idea that magnets can repel and attract. Students will diagram and write about what happens when they put two ring magnets together on a pencil. Students will also develop their own investigation on how to test the properties of magnets.

Students will understand what magnets are and how they can use magnets to apply force on objects. Students will learn that many magnetic objects have iron in them and observe this in cereal.

This article compares naturally occuring magnets with industrially produced magnets. It then explains how magnets attract metals and how a compass works. The text is written for native speakers age 8 and up.

In this lesson, students engineer a circuit and explain how energy is passed from one source to another.

Students will conduct three related investigation concerning magnetic attraction and the relative strength of magnets. The three investigations can be completed in any order, so can be set up as centers or for small group sessions. Students will record their observations on the provided data sheet.

In this lesson, students learn how to create electromagnets using batteries, copper wire, metal (nail), and paper clips. Students will then identify what objects are attracted to magnets, and how this attraction works.

In this classroom activity, students investigate why magnets attract certain objects and how the magnets can attract or repel each other. Students will observe, question, and investigate how the magnets interact with each other and the objects around them.

In this classroom activity, students will investigate the magnetic pull of a bar magnet at varying distances with the use of paper clips. Students will hypothesize, conduct the experiment, collect the data, and draw conclusions that support their data. Each student will record the experiment and their findings in their science journals. As a class, students will compare each group's data and their interpretation of the results.

ELL students will discover how magnetic poles interact with each other and with other materials in this set of video. Close captioning and descriptions are available.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the many forms of energy. Energy station materials are explored and discussed to introduce and clarify characteristics of each form of energy.

In this activity students will investigate magnets and what they attract through observation and discussion. Students will record their findings in a science journal.