As students progress in grade levels, science lessons become more intense and often more difficult. To keep students from falling behind, you need to engage them in an array of activities. Providing opportunities for online learning reaches out to the population of students, including fourth-graders, who benefit from such tactics.
Research Projects
At the fourth-grade level, students have most likely not engaged in too many research projects before. Teach them how to use the Internet for research, how to limit searches to websites with .edu or .gov endings and how to cite their sources in their papers. Assign them a grade-appropriate topic such as parts of an animal cell, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, the phases of the moon or weather instruments.
Online Labs
If you do not have the time, space or resources to allow students to do actual labs in the classroom, have them watch some labs online. Available topics are wide and varied and include animal behavior, virtual DNA labs, solar system simulators, graphing labs and so forth. After the class has watched the lab online, give the fourth-graders a series of questions to respond to, ensuring they have understood what they just watched.
Read more: yoursciencefairprojects.com