Back to School Basics: What Parents Need to Know About 4th Grade Math

Is your child getting a little nervous about 4th grade math? Maybe you can give him some confidence and lessen those nerves with a little primer on what to expect. Even if it doesn’t help your child, or if your child isn’t having a problem with nerves, you can get a handle on what to expect by giving yourself a rough idea of what will happen in the year in math class.

Knowledge of Numbers

By fourth grade, students should have a good handle on the whole number and place values all the way to the millions. In this year they will get a deeper understanding of how those numbers relate to one another, and they will learn new ways to show numbers. Mental math will become important in this grade, and they will be comparing numbers in different representations using the greater than, less than and equals signs.

Knowledge of Math Facts

By fourth grade, students should have memorized their multiplication and division tables in addition to their subtraction and math facts. Because they will be multiplying and dividing large numbers at this grade, they need to have their basic math facts fully committed to memory.

This year they will be moving past basic operations and learn the meaning behind those operations. This is often shown in word problems. They will be able to derive from a word problem what operation will find the answer, and sometimes those problems will include multiple steps.

Fractions and Decimals

Work with fractions and decimals gets more intense in fourth grade. Students will be comparing, adding, and subtracting these numbers. They will also be rounding and estimating using fractions and decimals. Problems with money are quite common in fourth grade.

Introducing Algebra

Algebraic problems will start to look a lot more like the algebra that students will face in high school this year. They will begin to use variables and will work with problems that have parenthesis in them. They will also learn that adding and subtracting the same number on both sides of the equals sign does not change the equation.