Order of Operations
Free 4th grade order of operations worksheets. Free printable 4th grade order of operations worksheets. Nine weeks covering PEMDAS basics — left-to-right rules, multiplication before addition, parentheses, the distributive property, and writing expressions from word problems.
What's Included
- 5 worksheets per week
- Full answer keys included
- Common Core aligned (5.OA.A.1, brackets, or braces in numerical expressions)
- Print-ready PDF format
All Weeks
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
Order of Operations
About Order of Operations
Order of operations is one of those topics that sounds like it should be simple — just do the math in the right order — but trips up more kids than you’d expect. The issue isn’t that the rules are complicated. The issue is that without the rules, “3 + 5 × 2” has two plausible answers (13 or 16), and kids need to learn which one math actually means.
The first week just establishes that order matters. When you only have addition and subtraction, you go left to right. Simple enough. But even here, kids discover that 10 - 3 + 2 is not the same as 10 - (3 + 2), and that’s genuinely surprising to most of them. Week 2 introduces the big rule: multiplication and division happen before addition and subtraction. This is where PEMDAS enters the picture.
Parentheses Change Everything
Weeks 3 and 4 are about parentheses — the override button. Parentheses force whatever is inside them to happen first, regardless of the normal rules. The contrast between 3 + 5 × 2 = 13 and (3 + 5) × 2 = 16 is the single most important comparison in the entire unit. Once kids see that parentheses change the answer, they understand why notation matters.
Week 4 pushes into nested parentheses and more complex expressions. The “insert parentheses to make this equation true” problems are surprisingly engaging — they’re puzzles, not drill.
Beyond Calculating
Week 5 flips the skill around: instead of evaluating expressions, kids write them. “Twice the sum of 3 and 7” becomes 2 × (3 + 7). This translation skill matters because word problems don’t come pre-formatted as expressions. Being able to take a sentence and turn it into math is what separates a kid who can follow procedures from a kid who can solve problems.
Week 6 introduces the distributive property — not as an abstract rule, but as a mental math tool. 8 × 99 is hard. 8 × (100 - 1) = 800 - 8 = 792 is easy. That’s the kind of insight that makes kids feel like math is working for them instead of against them.
The last three weeks are word problems, puzzles, error analysis, and cumulative review. The puzzle problems — using four digits and any operations to hit a target number — are the ones kids actually want to do. And the error analysis teaches a skill that matters far beyond math: figuring out where something went wrong is harder and more useful than getting it right the first time.