About this worksheet

Column addition with regrouping is a core Year 4 skill, and the trickiest part for most students isn’t the addition itself — it’s remembering to carry correctly when a column totals 10 or more. This worksheet gives focused, structured practice on exactly that, using 3- and 4-digit numbers where every single question requires at least one regrouping step, so there’s no way to coast through without really understanding the carry.

The worksheet follows our usual four-part structure. The Fluency section (16 questions) is pure column-addition practice, moving from 3-digit numbers up to 4-digit numbers, including a few trickier cases with multiple carries in a row (like 1,999 + 1,999). The Core section applies addition to real contexts: bakery sales, fundraising totals, car park numbers, and a two-step problem involving multiple deliveries of stock. The Reasoning section asks students to explain the “why” behind the method — why we start adding from the units column, how to use estimation to catch a mistake, and what regrouping actually means in terms of place value. The Challenge section goes further again, asking students to construct numbers that add to a target total, work backwards from a sum to find a missing addend, and reason about whether adding two 4-digit numbers can ever produce a 5-digit answer.

Every question — and every step of every worked solution — has been checked by hand, so teachers and parents can rely on the answer key without needing to re-verify the mathematics themselves. A full, fully worked marking key is included as a separate download, with mark allocations shown for every question.

This worksheet aligns with the WA Year 4 curriculum descriptor WA4MNAAS1 and is free to download and use in the classroom or at home.

Common errors we see in tutoring

• Forgetting to carry the regrouped ten into the next column
• Writing the carried digit as part of the answer instead of adding it in
• Misaligning digits by place value when numbers have different lengths