5th grade compare and contrast worksheets

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Fifth grade compare and contrast reaches nonfiction with structure: a passage may organize by subject (all about one, then the other) or by feature (ears, then size, then trunks). Your child answers questions that pull from both halves at once, the reading pattern textbooks and tests lean on hardest.

Free printable PDF worksheet, aligned to Common Core RI.5.5.

Each click picks one of the 25 passages written for this grade. Every sheet comes with its answer key. You don't need to sign up.

The kind of passages you'll get

Read the passage. Then circle the letter of the best answer for each question.

The Slow Sculptors

A mountain looks permanent, but it is always being taken apart. Two natural processes do the work, and they are so closely linked that people often blur them together. One is weathering. The other is erosion. Weathering breaks rock into smaller pieces right where it…

  1. How are weathering and erosion alike? Both are driven by forces like water, ice, and wind. · Both carry broken pieces of rock away to new places. · Both break rock apart right where it happens to sit. · Both happen only in hot, dry, sandy deserts.

    Answer: Both are driven by forces like water, ice, and wind.

  2. How is weathering different from erosion? Weathering breaks rock in place; erosion carries the pieces off. · Weathering carries the pieces off; erosion breaks rock in place. · Weathering is slow; erosion always finishes its work in a single day. · Weathering uses water; erosion never uses water at all.

Each print picks one of the 25 passages written for this grade, and its questions come with it. With 25 to pick from, a second print can land on one you've used, so check the title before you hand it out.

What's on a 5th grade sheet

5th grade sheets draw from 25 passages, 251 to 329 words long. 15 of the 25 aren't on 4th grade sheets. The other 10 are. On 4th grade sheets they run 251 to 282 words.

Some of the titles: The Two Bakeries of Bellamy Square, Two Classrooms, One Hallway, What You Get and What You Expect, New in October, Too Small to See, Gentle Slopes and Steep Cones.

Every version prints on US Letter or A4, with its answer key on the last page.

How to teach this

Show the two shapes a comparison can take: one subject then the other, or feature by feature. Ask which shape the passage uses and where the author switches sides. Recognizing the shape tells your child where to look before a question ever asks.

Watch for: Kids latch onto differences and skip what the two things share. The alike questions are usually the ones that need a second look at the passage. A fact about only ONE of the two things answers neither kind of question. If the passage says it about just the frog, it is not a both answer, no matter how true it is.

Common questions about 5th grade compare and contrast

What is text structure doing in a comparison passage?
Authors organize comparisons two ways: whole subject at a time, or one feature at a time. Fifth graders learn to spot which, because the structure says where each answer lives.
How does this help with tests and textbooks?
Paired passages and compare questions are fixtures of reading tests, and science texts compare constantly. Practicing the moves here makes those pages feel familiar.

Related worksheets

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Want a different passage? Print again. Each print picks one of the 25.

Aligned to Common Core RI.5.5. Reviewed by the One more sheet team. Content version 241, updated October 2026.

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