Salem Elementary: Fourth Grade Curriculum

Fourth Grade
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Fourth Grade Curriculum

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) creates instructional programs based on the North Carolina Standard Course of Study as specified by the NC Department of Public Instruction. For an overview of WCPSS instructional programs, see WCPSS Connections.

Salem Elementary supplements the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and WCPSS instructional program with the concepts of Core Knowledge.

What Is Core Knowledge?
Core Knowledge is an idea for promoting academic excellence, greater fairness, and higher literacy in elementary and middle schools by implementing a solid, specific, shared core curriculum. Core Knowledge is designed to help children establish strong foundations of knowledge, grade by grade. For more information on Core Knowledge, see http://www.coreknowledge.org/.

Fourth Grade Core Knowledge
Language Arts
World History and Geography
American History and Geography
Mathematics
Science

Language Arts

I. Poetry

A. Poems
Afternoon on a Hill (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Clarence (Shel Silverstein)
Clouds (Christina Rossetti)
Concord Hymn (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Dreams (Langston Hughes)
The drum (Nikki Giovanni)
The Fog (Carl Sandburg)
George Washington (Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet)
Humanity (Elma Stuckey)
Paul Revere's Ride (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The Pobble Who Has No Toes (Edward Lear)
Life Doesn't Frighten Me (Maya Angelou)
Monday's Child Is Fair of Face (traditional)
The Rhinoceros (Ogden Nash)
Things (Eloise Greenfield)
A Tragic Story (William Makepeace Thackeray)

B. Terms
stanza and line

II. Sayings and Phrases
As the crow flies
Beauty is only skin deep.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Birds of a feather flock together.
Blow hot and cold
Break the ice
Bull in a china shop
Bury the hatchet
Can't hold a candle to
Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Etc.
Go to pot
Half a loaf is better than none.
Haste makes waste.
Laugh and the world laughs with you.
Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.
Live and let live.
Make ends meet.
Make hay while the sun shines.
Money burning a hole in your pocket
On the warpath
Once in a blue moon
One picture is worth a thousand words.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
RSVP
Run-of-the-mill
Seeing is believing.
Shipshape
Through thick and thin
Timbuktu
Two wrongs don't make a right.
When it rains, it pours.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

World History and Geography

I. Geography

A. Spatial Sense (Working with Maps, Globes, and Other Geographic Tools)
· Measure distances using map scales.
· Read maps and globes using longitude and latitude, coordinates, degrees.
· Prime Meridian ((0 degrees); Greenwich, England; 180 o line (International Date Line)
· Relief maps: elevations and depressions

B. Mountains and Mountain Ranges
· Major mountain ranges
· High mountains of the world

II. Europe in the Middle Ages

A. Background
· Beginning about AD. 200, nomadic, warlike tribes began moving into western Europe, attacking the
western Roman Empire; city of Rome sacked by Visigoths in AD. 410
The Huns: Attila the Hun
· Peoples settling in old Roman Empire included Vandals (cf. English word "vandalism'), Franks in
Gaul (now France), Angles (m England: cf. "Angle-land") and Saxons.
· The "Middle Ages" are generally dated from about AD. 450 to 1400. Approximately the first three
centuries after the fall of Rome (A.D. 476) are sometimes called the "Dark Ages."