What to Teach Fourth Graders: A Book Review
The ongoing debate on how to make sure our children learn to read and have the education they need is amazing. If they go to high school without good practical knowledge, it can spell disaster for their integration into adolescence and their academic years in high school. Fortunately, there are resources to ensure our students are on the right track before this.
So, let’s start in fourth grade. In fact, let me recommend a very good book on this very subject, one that I have in my own library. The book is;
“What Your Fourth Grade Student Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fourth Grade Education” (part of The Basic Knowledge Series), Edited by ED Hirsh Jr., published by Delta Trade Paperbacks, a division of Double Day Dell and Bantam Books, (1992), pp. 395, ISBN: 0-385-31260-1.
The editor is well known in educational circles and previously wrote “Cultural literacy” which has been widely used. This book is very easy to use and begins with one section; “How to Use This Book: For Parents and Teachers. This completely helps anyone who is a homeschooling parent or any new teacher at the fourth grade level. I read the entire book and felt right at home and even learned some cool stuff myself, probably relearned since fourth grade.
Okay, what kinds of themes are there in this book anyway, well, I’m certainly glad you asked. This book has chapters on poetry, short stories, language, and speech in the first section. In the second section are Geography, Civilizations, History.
The third section deals with Fine Arts, Visual Arts, Sketches, Drawing, Painting, Sculpture and Digital Arts. The fourth section is about math: addition, subtraction, division, line graphs, shapes, Roman numerals, decimals, multiplication, fractions, and points on a grid.
The fifth section deals with natural sciences, life sciences, earth sciences, continental drift, volcanoes, earthquakes, forests, and the ocean. If you have this book and you are teaching a fourth grader, you will never get lost. But perhaps most importantly, your student won’t be either, and you will give them the knowledge they need to move on. It’s really amazing how we have fallen in America with our education.
It is really books like this that guarantee the progress and education of our next generation, and we are only as good as our educational system and we worked on teaching 20 years before. Consider all of this.