The ongoing debate about how to make sure our children learn to read and get the education they need is amazing. If they reach high school without a good working 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 the 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 Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fourth Grade Education” (part of 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 publisher is well known in educational circles and previously wrote “Cultural Literacy” which has been widely used. This book is very easy to use and starts with one section; “How to Use This Book: For Parents and Teachers. This is a great help to anyone who is a homeschooling parent or any new teacher at the fourth grade level. I read the entire book and felt at home and even I learned some interesting things myself, I probably relearned it since fourth grade.
Okay, so what kind 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, Sketching, Drawing, Painting, Sculpture and Digital Arts. The Fourth section deals with Mathematics: 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 are teaching a fourth grader, it will never get lost. But perhaps more importantly, your student won’t be either, giving you the knowledge they need to move forward. It is truly amazing how far we have fallen in the US with our education.
It is truly books like this that guarantee the progress and education of our next generation, and we are only as good as our education system and we worked on teaching 20 years before. Please consider all this.
