Connecting Clues: Relative Pronouns
- Grade band
- 4
- Duration
- 40 minutes
- Skill
- Relative pronouns and relative adverbs
- Standards
- L.4.1a — Use relative pronouns (who, whose, whom, which, that) and relative adverbs (where, when, why).
- Materials
- Student worksheet (printable, included)
- Pencils
Learning objectives
- Students will be able to identify a relative pronoun or relative adverb in a sentence.
- Students will be able to select the correct relative pronoun or adverb to introduce a clause.
- Students will be able to combine two related sentences into one using a relative pronoun or adverb.
Lesson procedure
- Warm-up (5 minutes) — I Do. Write two short sentences on the board: "I have a dog. The dog loves to swim." Combine them: "I have a dog that loves to swim." Ask what word did the combining.
- Sort the connectors (10 minutes) — We Do. In pairs, students sort example sentences by which relative pronoun or adverb they use, noticing who is for people, where is for places, and so on.
- Combine practice (15 minutes) — You Do. Students complete Part 1 of the worksheet, combining sentence pairs using the relative pronoun or adverb that fits best.
- Write your own (7 minutes) — You Do. Students write two original combined sentences about their own life on Part 2.
- Share-out (3 minutes) — Closure. A few students read one combined sentence aloud and name which connecting word they used.
Printable worksheet
Part 1: Combine the sentences. Join each pair using who, which, that, where, when, or why.
1. My teacher is Ms. Rivera. She loves science experiments.
→ ________________________________________
2. We went to the library. I found my favorite book there.
→ ________________________________________
3. I don't know the reason. My brother is upset for that reason.
→ ________________________________________
4. The bike is broken. The bike is in the garage.
→ ________________________________________
Part 2: Write your own. Combine two sentences of your own about a person and a place you know.
About a person (use who or whose): ________________________________________
About a place (use where): ________________________________________________
Background for the teacher
Relative pronouns (who, whose, whom, which, that) and relative adverbs (where, when, why) introduce a clause that gives more information about a noun earlier in the sentence — "The book that I borrowed" or "the park where we played." Fourth graders already use most of these correctly in speech; the skill this lesson targets is recognizing them in writing and using them deliberately to combine two short, choppy sentences into one smoother one.
The trickiest distinction at this age is "who" (for people) vs. "which" (for things) vs. "that" (for either, informally). Rather than presenting a strict rule up front, let students notice the pattern by sorting examples — most will already have working intuition, and naming what they already do correctly is more durable than a rule handed to them first.
Differentiation
Support: Provide a reference card listing each relative pronoun/adverb next to what it connects (who → a person, where → a place, when → a time) for students to check against during Part 1.
Extension: Challenge students to find a sentence in a book they're reading that uses a relative pronoun or adverb, copy it down, and identify which one it uses.
ELL support: Keep the reference card (who → person, where → place, when → time) visible and used consistently across the lesson — relative pronouns often map differently across languages, so a stable visual anchor matters more here than usual.
IEP/504 support: For Part 1, provide the correct relative pronoun already filled in for the first sentence as a model, and reduce the set to three sentence pairs instead of four.
Answer key (for teachers)
Part 1 — Combine the sentences. 1. "My teacher is Ms. Rivera, who loves science experiments." 2. "We went to the library, where I found my favorite book." 3. "I don't know the reason why my brother is upset." 4. "The bike that is in the garage is broken."
Part 2 — Write your own. Open-ended: accept any grammatically correct combined sentence using who/whose for the person and where for the place.
Digital extension (optional)
To practice combining ideas in a sillier context, try a fill-in-the-blank story in Giggle Gaps, where every blank is labeled with the word type it needs.