4th Grade
A year-long Bible course in the Gospels and Acts, the life of Jesus and the first church, runs beside the five academic courses. Five courses for a full 4th grade year, ELA built on evidence-based writing, mathematics through place value and fractions, energy-and-waves science, U.S. regions social studies, and an age-right health course. Every explanation is written for a nine-year-old, checked against a nine-year-old’s reading level.
The Bible course
The life of Jesus told once, in the order it happened, taking each episode from whichever of the four Gospels tells it best, and then Acts. Your child reads part of the passage aloud, tells it back without looking, and writes four or five sentences of it in a notebook they keep all year. That notebook asks one question three times, in week 1, week 20 and week 36: who do you say that I am. There is no quiz and nothing to mark.
4 units, 36 lessons
A first lesson
Before the manger
Read, narrate and discuss “Before the manger” (John 1:1-18), and say John 1:14 (part) by heart.
Open the whole course and try a lesson, no account needed →King James throughout. Where Christian traditions differ, the course names the positions rather than choosing for your family. On origins it teaches six-day creation, and whether evolution is taught alongside it is your choice at signup. How our Christian curriculum approaches Scripture, science and denominational differences →
Five days from the opening week of the academic courses (Bible's own first week is above), taken from the lessons themselves rather than written to sound good.
The week opens by separating a guess from an inference: one sentence, 'Maria grabbed her umbrella and boots before leaving,' and two possible readings, 'it is raining' (backed by real clues in the sentence) against 'Maria likes purple' (backed by nothing). Naming the difference is the whole first lesson.
Math opens with place value stretched further than your child has seen it: 4,275 built with blocks, then the chart itself extended, ten hundreds make a thousand, ten thousands make a ten-thousand, until the columns run out past where third grade stopped.
Science starts with a fairness question before any content: two versions of the same test, described aloud, one where only one thing changed and one where two things changed, and your child has to say which one you can actually trust and why.
Social studies opens with a map of the neighborhood and a habit: find the title first, 'this tells us what the map is about,' then the key, the compass rose, the scale, always in that order, before the unit moves on to real U.S. regions.
Health starts by asking what your child already believes about food, sleep and play, previewing the full one-day plan they'll be able to build by the end of the unit, so the target is visible from day one instead of a surprise at the end.
The life of Jesus told once, in the order it happened, taking each episode from whichever of the four Gospels tells it best, and then Acts. Your child reads part of the passage aloud, tells it back without looking, and writes four or five sentences of it in a notebook they keep all year. That notebook asks one question three times, in week 1, week 20 and week 36: who do you say that I am. There is no quiz and nothing to mark.
This is a year of teaching a fourth-grader to back up what they say about a story or article with actual lines from the text, not vibes. They learn to figure out what a story is really about underneath the plot, to shrink a long article into a true short version instead of a retell, to notice when a chart is technically true but misleading, and to write three kinds of paragraphs — opinion, informative, narrative — that stay on topic. By the end they should be able to look at a mixed bag of reading and writing tasks and figure out on their own what kind of thinking each one wants.
This is the year your child moves from "school arithmetic" into "real math." They'll learn to name numbers up to a million, add and subtract big numbers reliably, multiply and divide multi-digit numbers using a picture-based method that actually explains why the standard steps work, and then take that same understanding into fractions and decimals. It ends with converting units, measuring angles, and sorting shapes by their properties instead of by "what they look like." Every new skill starts as a drawing — boxes, bars, a number line — before it turns into digits on a page, so your child always has something to point at when they get confused.
This is a full year of hands-on science built around one big idea: energy moves from place to place, and you can trace where it goes. Your child starts by smashing marbles into dominoes and rolling balls down ramps, then uses that same "energy went somewhere" thinking to understand waves, light, sound, how eyes and ears work, why cactus spines and mole eyes look the way they do, how rivers carve canyons, and finally why a dam or a wind farm is never a free lunch. It's mostly kitchen-table materials — flashlights, mirrors, string and cups, rulers, a tray of sand or dirt for a mini streambed — with a fair number of "why does it do that" arguments your child has to back up with actual evidence, not just a hunch.
This is a year-long tour of the United States done region by region — Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, West — plus a final unit on how state and federal government fit together. Your child will read real maps and charts as evidence (not just look at pretty pictures), meet named indigenous nations as governments that still exist today, and figure out why a place with rocky soil built ports and cities while a place with rich soil built farms. By the end they should be able to look at any U.S. region and explain why the land, the people, and the government there look the way they do.
This is a semester of health for a 4th grader, taught by you, 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week. It's not about grades or gym class — it's about your kid learning to think of their own body as something they run and take care of. They'll figure out why food, sleep, and movement matter (not for looks, but for what those things actually do inside them), how germs spread and why washing hands matters even when no one's watching, the safety rules for fire, streets, bikes, being online, and medicine, and finally how to name feelings, calm down, and be a decent friend when things get hard. Nothing here touches weight, appearance, or sex — it stays squarely in "how do I take care of this body and these relationships" territory.
Every course above is published in full, every unit, every module, every objective, and each course page opens a complete lesson you can work through without an account. When you are ready, the trial is free for 30 days, then $29 a month for the whole family.
Pictures before symbols, every time. Fraction bars and area models appear on screen before any notation does, distractors are built from the actual mistakes children make (like adding denominators), and the feedback names the specific error rather than saying "incorrect."
Yes. It covers habits, nutrition, safety, and naming feelings at 3rd-5th grade depth. It contains no sexuality content, that entire domain is left to families, deliberately.