4th Grade Comprehension Worksheets and Exercises

How Can My 4th Grader Improve Reading Fluency and Comprehension?

One way 4th graders can improve their reading comprehension is to increase their vocabulary. In addition to looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary, encourage your son or daughter to study roots, prefixes and suffixes. This can be done through free worksheets or interactive games available online. By studying the parts of words, your child will be better equipped to understand new words.

Several other online activities also exist that allow children to play games and interact with texts as they read. This can be beneficial in helping your child improve both summarization and comprehension skills. For additional practice, you may choose to provide your son or daughter with reading passages and comprehension questions that appeal to his or her interests.

Three 4th Grade Reading Comprehension Activities

Comprehension Questions

Comprehension questions are a quick and simple way to engage your child in active reading. Although it is likely that your son or daughter has completed a number of these in class, it's less likely that the reading passages were appealing to his or her specific interests. Several websites offer free reading passages that typically range from 1-3 pages with comprehension worksheets that include multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, summary and opinion questions.

By selecting these worksheets on your own, it will be easier to choose something your son or daughter will enjoy. For example, if your son enjoys sports, find a passage on the rules of baseball, or if your daughter loves clothing, chose a story about playing dress-up. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to select a specific type of passage, such as non-fiction, biography, poem or news article.

Pre-Reading Questions

Before your child reads a story, you can put his or her critical-thinking and analysis skills to work with this exercise. Start by having your son or daughter examine the book cover and read the back summary to find out a little bit more about the book. Once your child has an idea about the plot, have him or her write 5-10 discussion questions that you can talk about together. Having pre-reading questions will help your son or daughter become more engaged in the story as he or she hunts for the answers.

Context Clues

When trying to help your child improve reading and vocabulary skills, practice with context clues can be beneficial. As the vocabulary in required texts gets more difficult, your son or daughter must learn to utilize information in the surrounding sentences or paragraphs to determine the accurate definition of the word in question.

To help your child practice this skill, print a worksheet from the Internet or create your own that has several sentences and highlighted vocabulary words. Either have your child write down what he or she thinks the word means and then look it up in the dictionary or provide multiple-choice answers for your child to choose from. This practice will help your son or daughter learn new words and become more confident in his or her reading abilities.