Grammar & Punctuation

Fourth grade is where grammar stops being a list of rules to memorize and starts being something your child actually has to use. They’re writing longer pieces now — paragraphs, short reports, stories with dialogue. Suddenly the difference between a fragment and a real sentence matters. So does whether the verb agrees with the subject, whether the pronoun has a clear referent, and whether the comma is in the right spot or just sprinkled wherever it felt right.

This program walks through all of that across nine weeks. Week 1 starts with complete sentences — what makes a sentence complete, how to spot fragments and run-ons, and how to fix them. That foundation matters because almost every grammar mistake at this age traces back to not really seeing where a sentence begins and ends. Week 2 moves into subject-verb agreement, which sounds simple until a prepositional phrase gets between the subject and verb. “The box of crayons is on the desk” — your child needs to see that “box” is the subject, not “crayons.” That’s harder than it looks.

Verb tenses come in Week 3, including the irregular past tenses that fourth graders still get wrong (went, not goed; ran, not runned). Week 4 takes on pronouns — subject vs. object, possessives, and the antecedent rule. Then the program pivots to punctuation. Week 5 covers commas in all their fourth-grade forms: between items in a series, after introductory phrases, in compound sentences, in dates and addresses. Week 6 is quotation marks and dialogue formatting, which most kids find weirdly hard because the rules are picky and the punctuation lives in unusual places.

Week 7 drills the confused words that show up constantly in fourth-grade writing — there/their/they’re, your/you’re, to/too/two, its/it’s, then/than. Week 8 brings everything together with editing and proofreading practice on passages that contain multiple types of errors. Week 9 is a cumulative assessment.

Every week follows the same pattern: a teaching passage, then five worksheets that move from recognition to application to writing. Full answer keys explain the reasoning, not just the answer. That matters because grammar is one of those subjects where the “why” sticks better than the “what.” A child who understands why “she don’t” is wrong won’t make that mistake again — a child who just memorized that “doesn’t” is right will.

The whole program is aligned to Common Core Language standards L.4.1, L.4.2, and L.4.3, but it’s designed to work for homeschoolers, parents supplementing classroom work, and teachers looking for extra practice. Print as you go, work through one week per week or move faster if your child’s ready. PDFs are clean, the formatting is straightforward, and there’s no filler.