Fourth grade writing, grammar and spelling

Fourth grade is the note-taking year. The work shifts from writing what he already thinks to writing from a source without copying it, which is a genuinely different skill and the one most fourth graders have never been taught. Grammar gets relative pronouns, prepositional phrases, and dialogue punctuation. Spelling gets Greek and Latin roots. Free material is strong here for content and weak for composition instruction, which is exactly where the paid programs are worth the money.

• K
• 1st
• 2nd
• 3rd
• 4th
• 5th

What to aim for this year

By the end of fourth grade, a child working at grade level can usually do these.

• Writes legibly in cursive with enough speed that handwriting stops slowing down his thinking.
• Uses relative pronouns (who, whose, whom, which, that) and relative adverbs (where, when, why).
• Uses prepositional phrases and can see how they change the meaning of a sentence.
• Capitalizes titles of works and proper adjectives correctly.
• Punctuates dialogue with quotation marks and the commas that go with them.
• Uses commas correctly in compound and complex sentences.
• Spells multisyllable words built from common Greek and Latin roots and affixes.
• Takes notes from a source and writes from the notes with the source closed. This is the year's real skill.
• Writes a multi-paragraph informational or argumentative piece with a clear main idea and supporting evidence.
• Edits his own draft for run-on sentences and fragments, and uses a dictionary and thesaurus to do it.
• Takes notes in short phrases and in his own words instead of copying sentences.
• Groups notes into categories and uses the groups to set the order of the piece.
• Supports a point with concrete facts, numbers, and examples instead of vague words.
• Links one paragraph to the next with a transition instead of starting cold.
• Ends an informational piece with a conclusion that follows from what was written.
• Records the title, author, and year of a source while reading it, not afterward.
• Forms and uses the progressive verb tenses
• Tells apart the contraction it's and the possessive its
• Uses helping verbs such as can, may, must and might to show how certain something is
• Orders several adjectives in front of a noun the way English expects
• Spells multisyllable words that end in the shun sound, usually tion
• Forms the uppercase cursive letters, more than half of which are built from one large oval or one tall cane stroke.
• Joins a cursive capital to the letter that follows it, and lifts the pen on purpose when a capital cannot reach.

Teach it here

These rooms teach it on this site. No sign-up, nothing to buy, and they work with the internet switched off. Start here. Everything below is a fallback for when you want more than the app gives you.

• piece — A whole short piece of his own: put three things in the order they happened, give a real reason for what you think, say something true about a topic, pick the opening that makes somebody read on, write three sentences in a box, and tell revising apart from editing. It reads his piece back to him afterwards.
• sentence — Everything a child writes, built by tapping tiles rather than typing: spell a word from its letters, build a heard sentence from word tiles, choose the mark that ends it, join two halves with the word that makes sense, pick the sentence that covers a whole paragraph, put the paragraph back in order, and find the one thing that is wrong.
• cursive — Cursive from the Palmer letterforms: the letters, then sorting them by how they start (a swing up, an oval, or a hill), the baseline, midline and over-the-top joins, the tricky ones, spotting the letter whose slant does not match, the capitals, deciding before each capital whether the pen carries on or lifts, and finally whole words.
• typing — Keyboarding, which matters once research pieces run to several paragraphs.
• endings — Long words that end in the shun sound, built syllable by syllable, with tion chosen over the ways it sounds, and words built from Greek and Latin roots.
• grammar — Relative pronouns and adverbs (who, whose, whom, which, that, where, when, why), prepositional phrases matched to a drawing and found inside a sentence, the progressive tenses, its and it's, helping verbs that show how sure (must, might, can't), and adjectives in the order English expects.
• marks — Capitals and punctuation put in by hand: he taps the gap where each space, period, comma, apostrophe or quotation mark goes, and taps the words that need capitals. Seventeen steps from spaces between words in kindergarten to capitals for names, days and months, apostrophes, commas in lists, dates and addresses, a letter's greeting and closing, dialogue, compound and complex sentences, commas around extra information in fifth grade, and a comma that changes what a sentence means ("Let's eat, Grandma!").
• notes — Research from short source pages: the best note in a few words of his own instead of a copied sentence, the title, author and year taken off the cover before reading, notes grouped and the groups put in paragraph order, a concrete fact picked over vague words, a transition between paragraphs, and a conclusion that follows.

What a week looks like

1. Four days, fifteen minutes of grammar and editing on connected text rather than loose sentences.
2. Three days, notes from one source, then write from the notes with the source closed. Closing the source is the whole exercise.
3. Two days, sentence work. Imitate one sentence, combine two, expand one.
4. One day, he reads his own piece aloud and marks every place he ran out of breath. Those are the run-ons.

If you want more, free

A fallback, not the plan. Every one of these costs nothing, and the license tag says what you may actually DO with it, which is a different question from whether it is free to read.

• The Good and the Beautiful, Language Arts Level 4 Free Openly licensed

  Free full-year PDF: two course books, an answer key, and three novels (Leo and the Lighthouse, Nettie's Letters, Whisper Creek). Grammar, writing assignments and literature in one course book keeps the number of moving parts down. Important correction: the Level 4 download does not include a spelling practice book. Spelling moved to the publisher's separate Simply Spelling program, which is free online, with an optional paid practice workbook.

  License: Free to download and fully copyrighted, not openly licensed.

• Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), Grade 4 Free Creative Commons Not confirmed

  Free grade 4 units pairing content knowledge with writing tasks. The strongest free option for source-based expository writing at this age, because the child already knows the content before he writes about it.

  License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, 3.0 Unported on the documents I checked. Adapt and share with credit, no commercial use, ShareAlike carries forward to derivatives.

• Khan Academy, the original all-ages Grammar course Free Free to use Not confirmed

  Free grammar videos and practice. Correction worth knowing before you go looking: there is no grade 4 grammar course. Khan's grade-banded grammar courses begin at grades 5 and 6. Khan did add Reading and Vocab courses for grades 4 and 5, which are useful but are not grammar. Use the all-ages Grammar course in ten-minute doses on whatever he is currently getting wrong.

  License: Free to use with an account. Licensing varies by item; check before copying or adapting.

• NASA, NOAA and other federal agency educational materials Free Public domain Not confirmed

  Free, accurate, well-illustrated source material for informational and research writing. A fourth grader writing about hurricanes or the Moon should be reading the agency that studies them rather than a content farm, and the reading level on the education pages is usually right for him.

  License: Works created by US federal government employees are generally public domain. Both agencies also host contractor work and third-party images that are not, so check the credit line on each individual item before reusing it. Do not assume a whole site is public domain because the domain ends in .gov.

• EngageNY / EL Education ELA Grade 4 modules Free Creative Commons Not confirmed

  Openly licensed classroom modules built around writing from sources, with graphic organizers and writing rubrics included. Expect to cut roughly half for a single child. As with grade 3, engageny.org is retired and its links no longer resolve, so find these through EL Education or a mirror.

  License: Check the license on the specific module. Generally Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, but it varies by module and the embedded texts often carry separate rights. I could not confirm current terms from a live publisher page.

And the paid programs, honestly

Nothing here is required. These are the programs families most often ask about, with the real drawback of each one named rather than skipped.

• IEW Structure and Style for Students, Year 1 Level A Paid About $169 for the Basic streaming set; about $35 for the binder and student packet with no video. Premier bundles cost more. Checked August 2026.

  Good at: Keyword outlines give a fourth grader a repeatable way to take notes from a source and write from them without copying, which is exactly the skill this year demands. The video instructor means the parent does not have to be the writing expert.

  Drawback: The stylistic checklist produces formulaic, over-decorated prose that has to be unlearned in middle school. It is also the most expensive item on this page.

  Suits: A fourth grader who freezes when asked to write from research.

• Fix It! Grammar Level 2 (IEW) Paid About $29 for the teacher and student combo, the same as Level 1's verified price. Verify the specific level before ordering.

  Good at: Fifteen minutes a day of grammar applied to a real running passage, cumulative, with vocabulary and punctuation folded in. It sticks better than isolated worksheets because he rewrites the corrected sentence every time.

  Drawback: Strictly sequential. Starting at Level 2 without Level 1's marking vocabulary is rough. Requires the teacher's manual and daily parent checking.

  Suits: A family already running Fix It Level 1.

• Killgallon, Sentence Composing for Elementary School Paid List price is about $37, with bulk and retailer discounts bringing it down somewhat. The earlier $20 to $30 figure was too low.

  Good at: Sentence imitation, expanding and combining, which is one of the few writing interventions with genuinely solid research behind it. One book, and it targets the thing that actually moves writing quality. Heinemann publishes a free companion teacher booklet.

  Drawback: Thin teacher support and no scope and sequence. You are the program. A parent who wants a scripted lesson will find it bare. It also costs more than most single workbooks.

  Suits: A child whose ideas are fine and whose sentences are flat.

• All About Spelling Level 4 Paid $69.95 for the Level 4 materials at the publisher, verified August 2026. The review box is $17.95 per additional student; the letter tiles at $25.95 are a one-time household purchase.

  Good at: Multisyllable words, syllable division, and the rules that finally explain the words that looked like exceptions in second grade. Mastery-based with automatic review.

  Drawback: Still entirely parent-led at an age when most families want independent work. If writing rather than spelling is the weak spot, this is the wrong place to spend the money.

  Suits: A fourth grader who still spells by sound and guesses at anything long.

• Evan-Moor Daily Paragraph Editing, Grade 4 Paid Price and current availability need checking. Evan-Moor titles are now distributed through Carson Dellosa and I could not confirm this specific title on their site, so do not order from a remembered price.

  Good at: Daily editing practice on connected paragraphs rather than isolated sentences, and it takes about ten minutes. Easy to slot into a full week.

  Drawback: It is practice for a skill that has to be taught somewhere else. Used on its own it becomes busywork, and a child can complete the page correctly without transferring any of it to his own writing.

  Suits: A supplement, never a program. Confirm it is still in print before planning around it.

Prices are approximate and change often. Check with the publisher before you buy. We describe and link to these programs; none of their material is hosted here.

The rest of fourth grade