In 4th grade collaborative partner work during math is essential. This powerful opportunity gives students the chance to share their thinking, listen to different approaches, and build understanding together. When students explain their reasoning to a partner, they strengthen their own grasp of concepts and learn to communicate ideas clearly. Listening to a peer’s perspective helps them see that there are often multiple ways to solve a problem, which develops flexible thinking.
Working with a partner also builds important skills beyond math. Students practice patience, active listening, and respectful discussion—skills that help them collaborate effectively in any situation. Over time, this process not only makes them stronger learners who are confident in tackling challenges, but also prepares them to be leaders. Leaders must be able to work with others, value diverse viewpoints, and guide discussions toward solutions. Partner work in math lays this foundation by helping students grow as problem solvers, communicators, and teammates.
In 4th grade science, students are experiencing firsthand how animals, including humans, process sensory information to survive. We have explored many different senses and the pathways it takes for sensory information to travel through before we interpret what our response should be.
Both animals and humans use their sense of hearing to gather information about their environment for survival purposes (avoid predators, find others of their kind). Sound can be very important to animals that hunt at night. Our students were able to imagine they were animals that have poor eyesight and had to rely only on sound and hearing to communicate. They were given different noisemakers and tasked with finding members of their group that communicated with the same sound before being captured as prey by a predator. Students’ vision was limited so they had to rely on their sense of hearing.
All of our students enjoyed this activity and agreed that it was difficult to discern their sound from others when their vision was compromised. They also concluded that the predator had an easier time finding them than they had finding others in their same groups.
Additional settings for Safari Browser.
