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. 

In this activity, students will explore how to prove that light travels in a straight line using 3 index cards, with a hole punched in each one, and a flashlight.

In this activity, students investigate the concept of light refraction by observing a penny before it is immersed in water and after immersion through the water. Students analyze their observations with provided questions and are asked to try the same activity with oil to replace the water and observe any differences.

On this webpage, students can read brief descriptions of how light travels (or cannot travel) through different objects, how light is refelected off of some objects, and how light is absorbed by some objects. Students can roll their mouse over each description to reveal an illustration.

This activity is designed for students working in small groups to investigate light and some of its properties. Through observation and manipulating equipment students will conclude light travels in a straight line. They will be asked to show through drawings and written description what happened to the path of light when it comes in contact with an object. Questions will be generated for further investigation to reinforce their ideas. Groups will be asked to present their findings. The vocabulary words to be discovered are reflect, absorb, and redirect.

In this lesson, students conduct several activities to investigate mirrors and properties of light.

Students investigate specular and diffuse reflection by looking into a dark box and shining a torch at various objects, colored paper and a mirror.

Students aim spears at a model of a fish in a container of water. When they move their spears toward the fish, they miss. This activity investigates refraction.

These simple demonstration are a great way to illustrate the path of light as it reflects off mirrors and how this is used in telescopes.

In this activity, students will investigate how light reflects off smooth surfaces (mirrors), learn about angles of reflection, and apply that knowledge in a relay experiment where they must direct a light beam around the room by reflecting it off 3 mirrors to hit a target placed in the classroom. Each group will investigate different paths and angles of reflection to hit a target. Once they have found a viable solution, they need to demonstrate their success to the teacher. Teachers will record observations throughout this exploration, documenting student progress in the groups and recording when each group has found a successful solution. Each group is required to complete one relay, but may continue hitting other relay targets as time allows.

This resource is a compilation of text, videos, and other elements to create a scaffolded 5E learning experience for students. The resource scaffolds learning from the initial concept of how light travels in a straight line, to the more complext topic of what materials can light travel through, and finally culminating in the concepts of reflection and refraction.

In this lesson, students make a solar bulb out of a plastic bottle and use it to demonstrate refraction.

Students will research lighthouses of North Carolina using print and digital resources and create a digital presentation on the NC lighthouse of their choice. After studying basic electric circuits, students will use cardboard and Makedo tools to design and build a model of this lighthouse and wire it to light using a kit of electronic supplies. Students will showcase their final products with friends and family using digital photography, Google Presentations and a screencast video on Flipgrid or another platform of the teacher’s choosing. Students will submit a Seesaw documenting their experience with the Design and Engineering Process while building their lighthouse.

In this activity, students use informal investigation skills to observe the different effects of lights and mirrors using a mirror box.

The purpose of this activity is to introduce students to a basic property of light and how we use this property in our everyday lives. Students will make a pinhole camera to investigate how light travels in straight lines.

In this activity, students experiment with reflection using plane mirrors through four simple investigation activities.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 4th Grade Science.