5th grade text features worksheets

Tap to see another sample sheet.

Fifth grade text features worksheets are nonfiction articles of about 210 words laid out like a textbook page: four or five headed sections, with a Words to Know glossary, a Did You Know? sidebar, a timeline or a Try This activity in most of them. Five questions with four choices ask where a fact lives, which section a new fact or photo belongs in, and why the author added a feature.

Free printable PDF worksheet.

Each click picks one of the 13 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.

Rivers of Ice

What Is a Glacier? A glacier is a huge, slow-moving mass of ice. It forms over many years in places where more snow falls in winter than melts in summer. The snow piles up and presses down until it turns into thick ice, which slowly…

  1. Which section explains how snow turns into glacier ice? What Is a Glacier? · How Glaciers Shape the Land · Glaciers Today · Did You Know?

    Answer: What Is a Glacier?

  2. A reader wants to add that the Antarctic ice sheet is more than two miles thick in places. Which section fits best? Glaciers Today · What Is a Glacier? · Did You Know? · How Glaciers Shape the Land

Each print picks one of the 13 passages written for this grade, and its questions come with it. With 13 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 13 passages, 202 to 226 words long. None of these passages are on 4th grade sheets. On 4th grade sheets they run 120 to 143 words.

Some of the titles: Life on the Space Station, The Mighty Mississippi, A Can's Second Life, Reading the Clouds, Closing the Circuit, Finding Any Place on Earth.

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

How to teach this

Give your student thirty seconds with only the headings and sidebars, then ask what the article covers. Then read it. The questions about where a new fact belongs are the hard ones. Have your student say in a few words what the fact is about, then find the heading that promises that topic.

Watch for: Table of contents and index blur together for years. The trick that sticks: contents = big topics, front of the book; index = every little thing, back of the book, A to Z. Kids treat headings as skippable decoration and read straight past them. A heading is a free preview of its section, and readers who use them find answers in half the time.

Common questions about 5th grade text features

Is there a 5th grade standard for text features?
Not by name. The Common Core's text features standard stops at 3rd grade, and 5th grade moves on to text structure. These sheets are conventional practice, because 5th grade science and social studies books lean on headings, sidebars and glossaries.
How are 5th grade text features questions harder?
Naming a heading is the easy part. These questions ask where a caption or a new fact would go, or why the author put a detail in a sidebar, so your child has to understand what each section is for.
What topics do the articles cover?
Fifth grade science and social studies: the space station, the Mississippi, the Underground Railroad, the skeleton, rainforest layers, circuits, latitude and longitude, food chains and glaciers, among others. Each print picks one at random.

Related worksheets

Ready to print one?

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

Reviewed by the One more sheet team. Content version 241, updated October 2026.

Spot a mistake on this sheet? Tell us. · About these worksheets