Year 4 continues the Year 3/4 statutory word list and introduces more complex spelling patterns. Children are expected to spell words with a wider range of prefixes and suffixes, understand word families, and tackle increasingly tricky spellings.
Practise These Words FreeBy the end of Year 4, children should confidently spell all Year 3/4 statutory words, use a dictionary to check spellings, understand word families and root words, and apply spelling rules consistently in their writing.
All words below are from the UK National Curriculum. Prac2XL has 9,000+ words pre-loaded with audio pronunciation and curated misspellings — so even if your school sends home words not on this list, they're almost certainly covered.
Connect new words to ones they already know: “sign” → “signal” → “signature”
The “ough” family is notoriously tricky — practise these as a group
Silent letters need special attention: “knee”, “wrist”, “scissors”
Encourage your child to proofread their own writing for spelling
Year 4 introduces word families — “sign/signal/signature/design”, “act/action/active/actually”, “music/musician/musical.” These relationships are directly tested in 11+ verbal reasoning through analogy questions (“sign is to signature as act is to ___”). A child who understands how words connect within families has an enormous advantage in VR. They’re not memorising individual word pairs for the exam — they’re understanding how English works. Year 4 is also the year where the volume of statutory words increases significantly. Children who are keeping pace now won’t face a wall of unfamiliar words when 11+ preparation intensifies in Year 5.
11+ VR analogy: “electric is to electrician as music is to ___.” A child who learned the “music/musician/musical” family in Year 4 answers in seconds. A child seeing this pattern for the first time in a practice paper has to figure out the rule AND the answer.
Want to build all four dimensions — spelling, synonyms, antonyms, and words in sentences? Explore Vocab 360 →
Add these words (or your child's school list) to Prac2XL. Adaptive difficulty. Audio pronunciation. Parent stats. Free forever.
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Your child can spell "enormous." But do they know "huge" means the same thing? That "tiny" is its opposite? Can they use it naturally in a sentence? That deeper knowledge is what 11+ verbal reasoning, reading comprehension, and SATs SPaG actually test — and it takes years to build, not weeks to cram.
Vocab 360 builds all four dimensions of every word — Spelling, Synonyms, Antonyms, and Words in Sentences — across 1,350+ curriculum words. Starting from Year 2, your child adds ~5 new words per week. By Year 5, they've built a vocabulary foundation no amount of last-minute practice papers can replicate.