1st grade reading worksheets 14 sheets
Short stories and fact passages a first grader can read with a little help, each on one page with four questions and lines to answer on, and the phonics sheets grade 1 reads with: short and long vowels, silent e and digraphs. Print one, change it on its own page, or take the whole set as one PDF with the answer keys at the back.
The whole set in one PDF
All 14 sheets on this page, after a contents page, with the answer keys together at the back: 29 pages.
14 sheets
Stories 5
Priya Helps Make Pancakes
A story, 121 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RL.1.1
Fact passages 5
Clouds and the Weather
Facts from NOAA, 123 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.1.1
What a Plant Needs
Facts from the University of Illinois Extension, 147 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.1.1
How a Snowflake Forms
Facts from NOAA, 138 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.1.1
The West Indian Manatee
Facts from the National Park Service, 133 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.1.1
How Bats Get Through the Winter
Facts from the National Park Service, 137 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.1.1
Phonics 4
Short vowel sounds
Pictures to name and circle the short vowel heard in the middle.
Common Core RF.1.2.c
Silent e and vowel teams
Long vowel words with their spelling to write in, from a word bank.
Common Core RF.1.3.c
Digraph word sort
Words to sort by sh, ch, th and the other pairs of letters that make one sound.
Common Core RF.1.3.a
No sheets match that. Try a shorter word.
How the passages are chosen
Each passage is placed by the three things the Common Core weighs in a text: a readability score (Flesch-Kincaid, whose range for the grades 2 to 3 band is 1.98 to 5.34; these read mostly below it, at about 0.5 to 2.6), how the text is built and the words it uses, and what the questions ask of the reader. A child who reads easily can go on to the next grade’s page, and one who needs more practice can go back a grade; choose by how the child reads, not only by grade.
The questions
Every passage has four questions: two are answered in the text itself, one asks what happened or why, and the last has no single right answer, so the key gives a sample. Ask the child to point to the sentence that helped. The card names the standard the questions practise: RL.1.1 and RI.1.1, asking and answering questions about the key details.
Reading and phonics together
A first grader is still learning to sound words out, so the phonics sheets sit beside the passages: the short vowel in cat, the long vowel in cake, a silent e, and two letters that make one sound, as sh and ch. Read a passage aloud together first, then let the child read it again alone.
The whole set
The set prints every sheet on this page once, in the order shown, after a contents page that lists them with their page numbers. The answer keys come together at the back, so you can hand out the passages and keep the keys apart. On its own page, each passage can be printed alone, in bold type for a young reader, or on A4.