What children learn about sound in Year 4
What the national curriculum expects
Sound is taught in Year 4. Pupils should identify how sounds are made, associating some of them with something vibrating. They should recognise that vibrations from sounds travel through a medium to the ear, find patterns between the pitch of a sound and features of the object that produced it, find patterns between the volume of a sound and the strength of the vibrations that produced it, and recognise that sounds get fainter as the distance from the sound source increases.
Key knowledge and concepts
Within this topic, children build knowledge across how sound is made, travels and is heard:
How sounds are made
Vibrations, and what's moving when we hear something
How sound travels
How vibrations move through solids, liquids and gases
How we hear
The ear, and how vibrations become sound we recognise
Pitch
Why some sounds are high and others low
Volume
How the strength of a vibration changes how loud a sound is
Distance and loudness
Why sounds get fainter the further away you are
Musical instruments
How instruments make and change sound
Soundproofing
Which materials absorb sound, and how to test them
Where this topic sits within KS2
Sound is taught in Year 4, alongside Living things, Animals including humans, States of matter and Electricity. It builds on the Year 1 work on the senses, and pairs well with Light in Year 3 and Year 6, since both deal with how something travels and reaches us.
How to access this topic
Sound doesn’t sit on its own in the curriculum. The Cornerstones science curriculum is fully sequenced from EYFS through Year 1 to Year 6, so you can see what comes before, what follows and how the whole picture fits together. We’ve done the thinking, so your planning time goes into teaching, not sequencing.
Full curriculum
Subject curriculum
Quick Teach Individual lessons and resources for supplementing what you already teach.
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See how the full Cornerstones Science Curriculum sequences topics like this one across every year group.