4th grade reading worksheets 16 sheets
Stories and fact passages for fourth graders, on comets and Venus, hurricanes and earthquakes, cells, simple machines and the monarch’s long trip, each with four questions and lines to answer on, and the organizers 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 16 sheets on this page, after a contents page, with the answer keys together at the back: 31 pages.
16 sheets
Stories 2
Fact passages 12
The Monarch’s Long Trip
Facts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 130 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
Why Leaves Change Color
Facts from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 149 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
What Makes an Earthquake?
Facts from NASA, 141 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
The Leatherback Sea Turtle
Facts from NOAA, 157 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
Six Simple Machines
Facts from NASA, 149 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
What Is a Cell?
Facts from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, 166 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
The Volcano That Grew on a Farm
Facts from the U.S. Geological Survey, 128 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
Why Is the Sky Blue?
Facts from NASA, 164 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
What Is a Comet?
Facts from NASA, 169 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
How a Hurricane Grows
Facts from NASA, 159 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
Venus, the Hottest Planet
Facts from NASA, 157 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
Saturn and Its Rings
Facts from NASA, 140 words, with four questions and an answer key.
Common Core RI.4.1
Organizers 2
Main idea and details
The main idea at the top, the details that support it, and a summary.
Common Core RI.4.2
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 4 to 5 band is 4.51 to 7.73; these read at about 4.9 to 5.8, in its lower part), 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.4.1 and RI.4.1, asking and answering questions about the key details. The two stories from the 5th grade page ask, second, what a word means as it is used.
Main idea and cause
Grade 4 asks a reader to explain the main idea with the details that support it, and what happened and why in a science or history text. After a fact passage, the main idea organizer takes the main idea and the details that support it; the cause and effect organizer takes each event and its cause.
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.