Grade 4 · Brain Lab
The step up at grade 4 is not harder puzzles but puzzles where the obvious answer is a trap. Daily Academy targets the reasoning errors that survive into adulthood: reading a rule backwards, assuming an instruction means what was intended, and counting by listing until you lose track.
43 activities in this subject · free to use · no card to start
Canadian provinces write their curricula separately and word them differently, but the grade 4 expectations below are common across all of them. Daily Academy is skills-based rather than built to any one province’s document — see how it maps to your province.
“Everyone who finished got a medal” does not mean everyone with a medal finished. This is the single most common reasoning error there is, it is not obvious, and most adults make it too — which is exactly why it is worth practising deliberately at nine.
In planning puzzles the necessary move often appears to lose ground — carrying the goose back across the river. Being nearer the goal is not the same as being in a legal position, and children who optimise each step separately get stuck.
Asked how many outfits three shirts and two pairs of trousers make, a child who lists them will usually miss one. Multiplying works because every choice of the first is available with every choice of the second, and that structure is the thing to learn.
Straight from the library, at the difficulty they are served at. Every question carries an explanation that appears after answering, whether the answer was right or wrong.
Sequencing
Which do you do FIRST when you eat cereal?
Why: Pour it in the bowl. Eating has to come after, because there is nothing to eat until then.
Patterns
Look at this pattern: clap, clap, stamp, clap, clap, stamp.
What is the rule?
Why: Two claps, then a stamp, over and over. Saying the rule out loud is what lets you keep going forever.
Classification
Which one is not an animal?
Why: A spoon. The rule is animals — and a spoon is a thing, not a living creature.
Spatial Reasoning
The cat is under the table.
Where is the cat?
Why: Below the table. Under and below are two words for the same place.
Mastery is estimated per skill, never per subject, so strength in one can never average away a gap in another. Each page below carries a question you can ask tonight to check it yourself.
Chiefly three things: reasoning from a rule without over-reading it, planning several steps ahead including moves that appear to lose ground, and counting possibilities systematically rather than by listing. All three show up immediately in multi-step math problems and in reading for argument.
A grade 4 word problem usually has two steps, and the first produces a real, plausible-looking number. Stopping there is the most common lost mark in the year, and it is a reasoning habit rather than an arithmetic one — which is why practising it as a puzzle transfers.
Difficulty is set per child, not per grade. Daily Academy places each child on a continuous scale in a five-minute intake and adjusts each skill separately, so a puzzle sits just past what they can already do. The hardest question in each set is marked as an optional bonus and never required.
Twenty minutes, five stops, and every question pitched at your child rather than at their year group. The daily mission is free and stays free.