5th grade paired passages worksheets

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Fifth grade pairs use longer texts, often two informational pieces that approach a topic from different angles, or a story and an article that share a theme. Questions ask your child to integrate information from both texts and to notice what each one leaves out.

Free printable PDF worksheet, aligned to Common Core RL.5.9, RI.5.9.

Each click picks one of the 13 passage pairs 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 both passages. Then circle the letter of the best answer for each question. Some questions ask about one passage, and some ask about both.

Ice in the Shipping Lanes

Where Icebergs Come From: An iceberg begins as snow. On the island of Greenland, snow has fallen for hundreds of thousands of years and packed down under its own weight into a sheet of…

The Patrol That Titanic Started: On the night of April 14, 1912, the ocean liner Titanic struck an iceberg south of Newfoundland and sank in less than three hours. About fifteen hundred people died. Ships…

  1. According to Passage A, what is calving? a piece of a glacier breaking off into the sea · snow packing down under its own weight into ice · a berg melting in warm water · a current carrying ice south

    Answer: a piece of a glacier breaking off into the sea

  2. In Passage B, what problem on the night of the sinking does the writer point out? no one was collecting the ice warnings and passing them to every ship · the ships had no radios, so they could not warn one another about the ice · the iceberg was too small to see · the Coast Guard ignored the reports

Each print picks one of the 13 passage pairs written for this grade, and its questions come with it. A second print can land on a pair you've used, so check the titles before you hand it out.

What's on a 5th grade sheet

5th grade sheets draw from 13 passage pairs. A pair runs 334 to 362 words in all. 5th and 6th grade print from the same 13 passage pairs. What changes is the standard (RL.5.9, RI.5.9 here) and the teaching notes below. None of these passage pairs are on 4th grade sheets. On 4th grade sheets they run 284 to 298 words.

Some of the titles: The Summer That Never Came, Should the Clocks Keep Changing?, The Fastest Neighbor, Six Dots, What Are Zoos For?, The Great Wheel of 1893.

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

How to teach this

After the sheet, ask which passage your child trusted more and why. Different purposes, different evidence, different dates: naming the difference out loud is the skill, and the multiple-choice questions are the check that it happened.

Watch for: Answering from memory of the first passage after reading the second is the classic slip. For a 'both' question, go back and put a finger on the detail in each text before choosing. Two passages on one topic are not the same passage twice. They can disagree, cover different years, or use different kinds of evidence, and the questions are built on exactly those differences.

Common questions about 5th grade paired passages

Do the passages ever disagree?
Sometimes, on purpose. Two accounts of one event, or an argument and a reply, give the comparison questions something real to ask about. Noticing the disagreement is the skill.
How does this connect to writing?
The compare-and-contrast essay starts with exactly this reading. After the sheet, a two-sentence summary of each passage and one sentence on how they differ is a complete pre-write.

Related worksheets

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Want a different pair? Print again. Each print picks one of the 13.

Aligned to Common Core RL.5.9, RI.5.9. Reviewed by the One more sheet team. Content version 241, updated October 2026.

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