LifeLongmontLearning.com

A major academic transition happens between the third and fourth grade.

This is when reading skills become crucial to learning. Students transition between learning to read and reading to learn. It is during these school years when children acquire reading and other important academic skills that enable them to advance to more demanding work.

Success at this level is essential to establish a strong foundation for all higher learning. Here are some general markers that parents should be aware of to see if their child is on track.

By the end of fourth grade, your child should be able to:

• Read on his or her own for at least 30 minutes with good comprehension of what was read
• Summarize a book into a book report
• Memorize and recite facts for all subjects
• Work on research projects with guidance
• Write a structured paragraph with proper grammar and punctuation
• Understand cause and effect relationships
• Add and subtract decimals
• Compare decimals and fractions
• Multiply multi-digit numbers by two-digit numbers
• Divide multi-digit numbers by one-digit numbers

By the end of fifth grade, your child should be able to:

• Understand and explain the figurative and metaphorical use of words in text
• Identify conflict, climax and resolution in a story
• Write a well structured multi-paragraph composition
• Spell words correctly and reduce the frequency of misspelled words in composition
• Use learned problem-solving strategies to solve math problems
• Add and subtract fractions, decimals and percentages
• Understand and compute perimeter, area and volume of simple objects
• Use long division to divide large numbers by multi-digit divisors

By the end of sixth grade, your child should be able to:

• Write a multiple paragraph composition, give facts, use descriptive words and conclude by restating the main idea
• Use the writing process to proofread, revise, edit and turn in a final paper
• Use colons, semi-colons and commas properly
• Know and identify all parts of speech in a sentence
• Compare decimals, fractions, and mixed numbers, both positive and negative
• Use proportions to solve problems
• Calculate percentages
• Solve multi-step problems in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that use positive and negative integers
• Solve problems using rates, speed, distance, and time
• Look at statistical data and decide whether or not the data is valid
• Represent probabilities as ratios, proportions, decimals

Many students begin to struggle in the later elementary school years. Starting in the fourth grade, new concepts are introduced at more frequent rates. A child who is struggling with reading or has misunderstood a critical step in mathematics can fall behind and rapidly lose confidence.  If your child is struggling with homework and tests, early intervention is key to later academic achievement. Tutoring Club's diagnostic testing evaluates and detects the exact problem area your child has and then develops a personalized solution to get your child back on track and feeling good about school and themselves.