Free printable SSAT practice test for Grade 4

Sam found the mitten on the bus stop bench. It was small and red, with a white snowflake stitched on the back. It was clearly made for a little kid's hand.

"Someone's hand is cold right now," Sam said to his friend Nia.

"Just leave it," said Nia. "Whoever lost it will come back."

But the bus was coming, and the sky was turning gray. Sam tucked the mitten into his backpack. At school, he showed it to the office secretary, Mrs. Ortiz.

"Hmm," said Mrs. Ortiz. "No one has asked about a mitten today. But that snowflake looks handmade. Somebody worked hard on it."

Sam had an idea. He drew a picture of the mitten, wrote FOUND: ONE RED MITTEN underneath, and asked Mrs. Ortiz to tape it to the office window where every family could see it.

Three days passed. Sam checked the window every morning. On the fourth day, a woman came into the office holding the hand of a kindergartner. The little girl was wearing one red mitten with a white snowflake on it.

"My grandmother made these," the girl whispered when Mrs. Ortiz handed her the missing one. She pulled it on and wiggled her fingers.

Her mother turned to Sam. "Thank you. She's been sad all week."

On the bus that afternoon, Nia nudged him. "Okay," she said. "That was a good idea."

The roof of Leo's apartment building was flat, gray, and boring. It had a few old chairs, a rusty railing, and a view of other flat, gray, boring roofs.

"It needs something," Leo told his neighbor, Mr. Kim, who sometimes read his newspaper up there.

"Like what?" asked Mr. Kim.

"Tomatoes," said Leo. "And sunflowers. Maybe beans."

Mr. Kim lowered his newspaper. "Do you know how heavy a pot of wet soil is?"

Leo did not. So Mr. Kim showed him. Together they filled one bucket with soil and watered it, and Leo could barely lift it. "That's why you plan first," Mr. Kim said. "A roof can only hold so much weight."

They asked the building manager, who said yes as long as they kept the pots near the edges, where the roof was strongest. They used light plastic pots instead of clay ones. Leo made a chart of how much sunlight each corner got, and they put the tomatoes in the sunniest spot.

The first weeks were hard. A windy day knocked over the bean plants, so Leo and Mr. Kim tied them to sticks. A heat wave dried out the soil, so they took turns watering every evening.

By August, the gray roof was green and yellow. Neighbors came up to sit among the sunflowers. One evening, Leo handed Mr. Kim a bright red tomato.

"Not boring anymore," Mr. Kim said, smiling.

When winter comes, food becomes hard to find. Plants stop growing, insects disappear, and snow covers the ground. Some animals fly or walk to warmer places. Others stay put and do something remarkable: they hibernate.

Hibernation is much deeper than an ordinary night's sleep. A hibernating animal's body slows almost to a stop. Its heart beats much more slowly, and it breathes only now and then. Its body temperature drops, sometimes close to the temperature of the air in its den.

The woodchuck, also called the groundhog, is a famous hibernator. In the fall, it eats as much as it can and grows fat. Then it curls up in an underground burrow. During hibernation, its heart may beat only a few times a minute, and it lives on the fat it stored.

Many bats hibernate too. They hang upside down in caves, where the temperature stays cool but does not freeze. If people disturb them, the bats may wake up, and waking uses up energy they need to survive the winter.

Why does slowing down help? An active body burns a lot of energy, like a car with its engine running. By slowing everything down, a hibernating animal uses so little energy that its stored fat can last for months.

When spring returns and food appears again, the animal warms up, wakes, and goes back to its busy life.