Year 4 English
Discover what your child will learn in Year 4 English
In Year 4, students build on their foundational skills to become more independent and analytical in their work. They engage in more complex writing tasks, learning to research, organise, and present their ideas effectively. This year marks a significant transition in their literacy, as children work on strengthening their reading comprehension, expanding vocabulary, and utilising more advanced grammar and punctuation.
Reading
Year 4 students transition from fluent reading to critical thinking about texts. They apply comprehension strategies to summarise key ideas, infer meanings, and discuss character motivations. Students learn to distinguish between different text types and compare ideas across multiple sources. They develop independent word reading skills using phonics, syllabication patterns, and knowledge of affixes to decode complex words.
Spelling
Building on earlier strategies, Year 4 students focus on:
- Homophones (e.g., 'knight' and 'night')
- Words with silent letters (e.g., 'known')
- Prefixes and suffixes
- Abbreviations
Students are encouraged to use dictionaries and thesauruses regularly, expanding their vocabulary with synonyms and antonyms.
Grammar
Year 4 grammar introduces concepts such as relative pronouns, helping verbs, and progressive verb tenses. Students master the correct order of adjectives, prepositions, and prepositional phrases. They practice using relative pronouns and adverbs, as well as modal auxiliary verbs to express possibilities.
Punctuation
Year 4 students build on their understanding of basic punctuation while learning new, more complex punctuation rules. A key focus is on using quotation marks and commas. Children are taught how to correctly punctuate direct speech and quotes from a text or referring to book titles, and how to use commas to separate items in a list, punctuate dates, and addresses, and structure more complex sentences. They also learn to use commas before coordinating conjunctions in compound sentences, ensuring that two independent clauses are connected correctly and clearly.
Writing
In Year 4, children continue to build upon the writing skills they developed in earlier years, taking on more independent and analytical writing tasks. They learn to research topics, organise their ideas, and produce well-structured writing pieces. They refine their writing through planning, revising, and redrafting, often using technology and workbooks to improve their work.
Students focus on three main types of writing: opinion, informative, and narrative.
In opinion writing, they learn to develop strong arguments supported by evidence and persuasive techniques. Informative writing emphasises factual accuracy, organised presentation, and the use of topic-specific vocabulary. Narrative writing requires students to create stories with a clear structure, descriptive details, and well-developed characters, while using transitional words to guide the reader through an engaging plot.
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