Your child is beginning the Fourth Grade Earth Science unit developed by the Battle Creek Area Mathematics and Science Center. This unit was designed to promote science and engineering literacy and integrate reading and writing skills into high-interest science content. During the next twelve weeks, your child will be actively involved with the Processes that Shape Earth unit. This unit is geared for fourth graders and focuses on the following big ideas:
1. Obtain information through research, models, and investigations to discover how local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to earth forces.
2. Generate and evaluate a plan to reduce the impact of natural hazards.
3. Research topographical maps to analyze how plate tectonics and large-scale interactions are evident, based on their geographical location.
4. Investigate how living things affect the physical characteristics of their regions.
5. Use research to understand how water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soil, and sediments into smaller particles and then more them around.
6. Determine how the use of fossil fuels affects the shape of the land and the environment.
In this unit the activities are geared to build on students' inherent knowledge and provide experience in which they can use and apply their knowledge in a wider range of tasks. Students will be given the opportunity to examine, measure, reflect upon, describe, and discuss how geological events change the land.
Suggestions for activities to do at home with your student:
- start a rock or fossil collection
- keep a record of earthquakes around the world on a map
- visit the library to check out books about weathering and erosion, volcanoes, glaciers, landslides, earthquakes, fossils, natural resources, and fossil fuels.
- visit a museum with a dinosaur/fossil exhibit https://www.grpm.org/dinos/
