3rd grade reading worksheets 15 sheets
Stories and fact passages for third graders, on Mars and Jupiter, bison and bald eagles, the first airplane and the inside of the Earth, each on one page with four questions and lines to answer on, with the organizers grade 3 uses for main ideas and causes. 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 15 sheets on this page, after a contents page, with the answer keys together at the back: 29 pages.
15 sheets
Stories 2
Fact passages 11
Four Forces of Flight
Facts from NASA, 148 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
The Bald Eagle Comes Back
Facts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 143 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Your Living Bones
Facts from the National Cancer Institute, 145 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Mars, the Red Planet
Facts from NASA, 141 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Inside the Earth
Facts from the U.S. Geological Survey, 175 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Why We Have Seasons
Facts from NASA, 162 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Sea Otters and the Kelp Forest
Facts from NOAA, 139 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
The Bison of Yellowstone
Facts from the National Park Service, 157 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Jupiter, the Giant Planet
Facts from NASA, 163 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
The First Airplane Flight
Facts from the National Park Service, 166 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Water on the Move
Facts from NASA, 145 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.3.1
Organizers 2
Main idea and details
The main idea at the top, the details that support it, and a summary.
Common Core RI.3.2
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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 at about 3 to 4.9, at the top of it), 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.3.1 and RI.3.1, asking and answering questions about the key details.
Main idea and cause
Grade 3 asks a child to find the main idea of a passage and the details that support it, and to tell how one event leads to another. After a fact passage, the main idea organizer takes the main idea at the top and the details under it; the cause and effect organizer takes what happened and why.
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.