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To further their understanding of sound energy, students identify the different pitches and frequencies created by a vibrating ruler and a straw kazoo. They create high- and low-pitch sound waves.
Students continue to build a rigorous background in human sensors and their engineering equivalents by learning about electronic touch, light, sound and ultrasonic sensors that measure physical quantities somewhat like eyes, ears and skin. Specifically, they learn about microphones as one example of sound sensors, how sounds differ (intensity, pitch) and the components of sound waves (wavelength, period, frequency, amplitude). Using microphones connected to computers running (free) Audacity® software, student teams experiment with machine-generated sounds and their own voices and observe the resulting sound waves on the screen, helping them to understand that sounds are waves. Students take pre/post quizzes, complete a worksheet and watch two short online videos about "seeing" sound.
Science assessment rubrics for every grade from Grade 1-9, for each unit.
The following resources go with the Sound unit for grade 4 science.
Check out these 19 categories of great science podcasts that you can listen to with kids. Many of the categories have a number of podcasts within. Topics include oceans, dinosaurs, light, sound, space, senses, animals , plants and much, much more!
Did you know that there’s a listening app with ONLY content for kids?! It’s called Kids Listen, and it features a playlist curated especially for educational shows! Check it out at https://app.kidslisten.org, or as an Apple or Google Play app. What a great way to let your kids discover what they love.
Every week Science North will provide Grade 4 teachers with a pre-recorded video and printable resource.
Teachers will be able to share these YouTube videos and resources with students weekly.
Included are classroom videos, student handouts, and offline lesson plans.
These videos and handouts can be sent to students to provide them with key concepts and activities that link to the curriculum.
Students examine the existence of sound by listening to and seeing sound waves while conducting a set of simple activities as a class or in pairs at stations. Students describe sound in terms of its pitch, volume and frequency. They use this knowledge to discuss how engineers study sound waves to help people who cannot hear or talk.
Students learn the connections between the science of sound waves and engineering design for sound environments. Through three lessons, students come to better understand sound waves, including how they change with distance, travel through different mediums, and are enhanced or mitigated in designed sound environments. They are introduced to audio engineers who use their expert scientific knowledge to manipulate sound for music and film production. They see how the invention of the telephone pioneered communications engineering, leading to today's long-range communication industry and its worldwide impact. Students analyze materials for sound properties suitable for acoustic design, learning about the varied environments created by acoustical engineers. Hands-on activities include modeling the placement of microphones to create a specific musical image, modeling and analyzing a string telephone, and applyling what they've learned about sound waves and materials to model a controlled sound room.
This simulation lets you see sound waves. Adjust the frequency or volume and you can see and hear how the wave changes. Move the listener around and hear what she hears.
Students are introduced to the sound environment as an important aspect of a room or building. Several examples of acoustical engineering design for varied environments are presented. Students learn the connections between the science of sound waves and engineering design for sound environments.
In this lesson, students are introduced to communications engineers as people who enable long-range communication. In the lesson demonstration, students discuss the tendency of sound to diminish with distance and model this phenomenon using a slinky. Finally, Alexander Graham Bell is introduced as the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in communications engineering.
Students learn the decibel reading of various noises and why high-level readings damage hearing. Sound types and decibel readings are written on sheets of paper, and students arrange the sounds from the lowest to highest decibel levels. If available, a decibel meter can be used to measure sounds by students.
Students learn about sound and sound energy as they gather evidence that sound travels in waves. Teams work through five activity stations that provide different perspectives on how sound can be seen and felt. At one station, students observe oobleck (a shear-thickening fluid made of cornstarch and water) “dance” on a speaker as it interacts with sound waves (see Figure 1). At another station, the water or grain inside a petri dish placed on a speaker moves and make patterns, giving students a visual understanding of the wave properties of sound. At another station, students use objects of various materials and shapes (such as Styrofoam, paper, cardboard, foil) to amplify or distort the sound output of a homemade speaker (made from another TeachEngineering activity). At another station, students complete practice problems, drawing waves of varying amplitude and frequency. And at another station, they experiment with string (and guitar wire and stringed instruments, if available) to investigate how string tightness influences the plucked sound generated, and relate this sound to high/low frequency. A worksheet guides them through the five stations. Some or all of the stations may be included, depending on class size, resources and available instructors/aides, and this activity is ideal for an engineering family event.
In this unit of study students learn about sound waves. This unit integrates nine STEM attributes and was developed as part of the South Metro-Salem STEM Partnership's Teacher Leadership Team. Any instructional materials are included within this unit of study.
Students are provided with an understanding of sound and light waves through a "sunken treasure" theme a continuous storyline throughout the lessons. In the first five lessons, students learn about sound, and in the rest of the lessons, they explore light concepts. To begin, students are introduced to the concepts of longitudinal and transverse waves. Then they learn about wavelength and amplitude in transverse waves. In the third lesson, students learn about sound through the introduction of frequency and how it applies to musical sounds. Next, they learn all about echolocation what it is and how engineers use it to "see" things in the dark or deep underwater. The last of the five sound lessons introduces acoustics; students learn how different materials reflect and absorb sound.
Echolocation is the ability to orient by transmitting sound and receiving echoes from objects in the environment. As a result of a Marco-Polo type activity and subsequent lesson, students learn basic concepts of echolocation. They use these concepts to understand how dolphins use echolocation to locate prey, escape predators, navigate their environment, such as avoiding gillnets set by commercial fishing vessels. Students will also learn that dolphin sounds are vibrations created by vocal organs, and that sound is a type of wave or signal that carries energy and information especially in the dolphin's case. Students will learn that a dolphin's sense of hearing is highly enhanced and better than that of human hearing. Students will also be introduced to the concept of by-catch Students will learn what happens to animals caught through by-catch and why.
Why do humans have two ears? How do the properties of sound help with directional hearing? Students learn about directional hearing and how our brains determine the direction of sounds by the difference in time between arrival of sound waves at our right and left ears. Student pairs use experimental set-ups that include the headset portions of stethoscopes to investigate directional hearing by testing each other's ability to identify the direction from which sounds originate.
Students follow the steps of the engineering design process to create their own ear trumpet devices (used before modern-day hearing aids), including testing them with a set of reproducible sounds. They learn to recognize different pitches, and see how engineers must test designs and materials to achieve the best amplifying properties.
Music can loosely be defined as organized sound. The lesson objectives, understanding sound is a form of energy, understanding pitch, understanding sound traveling through a medium, and being able to separate music from sound, can provide a good knowledge base as to how sound, math, and music are related. Sound exists everywhere in the world; typically objects cause waves of pressure in the air which are perceived by people as sound. Among the sounds that exist in everyday life, a few of them produce a definite pitch. For example, blowing air over half full glass bottles, tapping a glass with a spoon, and tapping long steel rods against a hard surface all produce a definite pitch because a certain component of the object vibrates in a periodic fashion. The pitch produced by an object can be changed by the length or the volume of the portion that vibrates. For example, by gradually filling a bottle while blowing across the top, higher pitches can be generated. By organizing a few of these sounds with a clearer pitch, the sounds become closer to music. The very first musical instruments involved using various objects (e.g. bells) that have different pitches, which are played in sequence. The organization of the pitches is what transforms sounds into music. Since the first instruments, the ability to control pitch has greatly improved as illustrated by more modern instruments such as guitars, violins, pianos, and more. Music is comprised of organized sound, which is made of specific frequencies. This lesson will help define and elaborate on the connections between sound and music.