Year 4 Maths: What Your Child Will Learn

Victorian government and Catholic schools teach maths from the Victorian Curriculum, which sets out what students learn in stages called levels. For a picture of Year 4, this guide draws on Level 4; your child may work at different levels in different topics. An independent school can tell you what it follows.

In Level 3, children learn the multiplication facts for 3, 4, 5 and 10. Level 4 adds the rest, so that by the end of it they're expected to know every fact up to ten times ten, along with the division facts that go with them, like $56\div8=7$. There's no need for every table to be solid on the first day of Year 4, because learning the rest is part of the year.

Your child explains patterns in the tables: the fours double the twos, and the eights double the fours, helping with harder facts and bigger numbers without a calculator.

The Victorian Department of Education advises parents to avoid tying maths at home to speed, because expecting a child to work quickly can cause maths anxiety. So rather than timing the tables, you can ask your child which fact they find hardest and whether doubling a fact they know could help.

Your child also chooses mental or written methods for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, then uses rounding or an estimate to check whether the answer makes sense. In money problems, they work out purchases and change. In algebra, they find a missing number in an addition or subtraction equation, such as $18+\square=45$, using what they know about how the operations are related.

Our guide to times tables has more ways to practise them together.

Your child may already know fractions as parts of a whole: half a sandwich, a quarter of a cake. In Year 4 they practise treating them as numbers with their own place on a number line, counting along it in quarters, halves and thirds. The count carries on past 1, which gives mixed numerals: a whole number and a fraction together, like 1¼. Decimals first appear in Level 4, in tenths and hundredths.

Your child also learns about equivalent fractions, which name the same amount in different ways. The denominator is the bottom number of a fraction and says how many equal parts the whole is split into. You can split each half into two quarters or four eighths, so $\frac12,\;\frac24\text{ and }\frac48$ name the same amount.

Reading a clock to the minute comes in Level 3. In Level 4, your child moves on to working out how long things take, like the question at the start, including ones that cross from morning to afternoon, such as 11:30 am to 2 pm. They also convert between units of time, so a 90-minute movie runs for an hour and a half.

When your child measures, they read scales where the answer falls between the numbered marks. A measuring jug might be marked every 100 millilitres with the water sitting halfway between 300 and 400, or a thermometer might show a reading between two labelled lines. When the level in a jug isn't on a number, you can ask your child to read it for you. They also meet perimeter, the distance around the edge of a shape, measured in units such as centimetres. They measure area, the space inside a shape, by counting units such as equal-sized squares.

With shapes, your child names angles by comparing them with a right angle, the square corner of a page. An acute angle is smaller than a right angle, and an obtuse angle is bigger than a right angle but smaller than a straight line. They use grid references, the letter-and-number squares like B4 on a map, to describe where something is and how to get there. They also look for symmetry, including in shapes that look the same after being turned part of the way round.

In chance, your child orders events from least to most likely and learns to tell independent events from dependent ones. Events are independent when one doesn't change the chances of the next: a dice doesn't remember its last roll, so a six is no more or less likely after three sixes in a row. They're dependent when it does: once a card is drawn from a pack and kept, the cards left are different.

A board game with a dice gives your child a chance experiment to run. In Level 4, children repeat experiments like rolling a dice 20 times and describe how the results vary from one go to the next.

When one topic takes your child longer than the rest, their classroom teacher is the first person to talk to. They can tell you whether the class is still working on it and what would help at home. You can ask for a meeting outside parent-teacher conferences too. You can also ask whether the school runs extra maths help, such as small-group sessions or a homework club. For home, the Department of Education has free maths activities for Grades 3 to 6, built around things like sport, cooking and the weather.

If one-to-one time alongside school would suit your child, our primary maths tutors work in person across metropolitan Melbourne or online. A tutor can follow the class topic and go back over anything your child needs more time with.

Your child has the whole of 2027 for these ideas, and some will take longer than others. Next time you're watching the clock before school, you can ask your child how long you've got.

How will I know where my child is up to in maths?

Through the school report, which comes at least twice a year, usually at the end of Terms 2 and 4. In government schools it shows your child's progress through the curriculum's levels and, for maths, how their learning compares with what's expected at their age. Teachers use those levels to plan what your child learns next.

When does my child next sit NAPLAN?

In Year 5. NAPLAN is for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, so a child starting Year 4 in 2027 sits it next in 2028, and ACARA, which runs it, says students aren't expected to study for it.

If you kept your child's Year 3 NAPLAN report from 2026, you can enter its levels in our NAPLAN results explained tool to see what each one means.

We checked these official sources on 6 November 2026.