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.

Free, and legal to use

Every one of these costs nothing. The license tag says what you may actually do with it, which is not the same question as 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.

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.

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.

Practice it here, free

These rooms on this site cover part of the year's work. No sign-up, and they work offline.

• typing — Keyboarding, which matters once research pieces run to several paragraphs.

The rest of fourth grade