What spellings do kids learn in Year 4?

This is a summary of the UK National Curriculum Literacy strategy Spellings Bank for Year 4 (age 8-9) in the order in which it’s studied, as used by your child’s class teacher.
Be amazed at what your child is learning, and what they can do for themself with the right tools.

Use this list to:

Talk to your kids about what they’re learning, and how they learned it. Please don’t just sit them down and force them to memorise these lists. Talk aids recall.

Ask if they want you to help by ‘spot testing’.

Let your child use the summary as a checklist. Let them do it themselves: self-testing, marking how well they can do it and chart their own progress the more they practise: (5/10 > 7/10 > 9/10). The more they take charge of their own learning, the better.

Summary: All Topics In Order

TERM ONE

Doubling -nn- -tt- -pp- -ll- etc

Common homophones too/two/too, they’re/their/there, etc

Regular verb endings -s, -ed, -ing

Irregular verbs go/went/can/could

Suffixes -al, -ary, -ic

Suffixes -ship, -hood, -ness, -ment

Transforming nouns into verbs note > notify etc

TERM TWO

8. What happens to (f) when suffixes are added? f > v
9. Spelling common words that end -ight
10. To recognise and spell the prefixes al- etc

TERM THREE
11. Same spelling, different sound -ough, -ear, -ight, etc.
12. Collect/classify words with different roots advent, invent, prevent
13. Practise extending and compounding words -ful, -ly, -ive etc
14. Suffixes -ive, -ible, -able etc
15. Its, it’s