Compare and contrast worksheets

Each click picks one of the 23 passages written for this grade. Every sheet comes with its answer key. You don't need to sign up.

Comparing finds how two things are alike. Contrasting finds how they differ. Good readers do both at once.

Six grades, each its own sheet. Print one here, or open a grade for examples and teaching notes.

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  1. 1st grade

    Examples and teaching notes

    First grade compare and contrast worksheets pair two characters or two familiar things in a passage of about eighty words, such as two puppies or ducks and chickens. Your child answers four questions about how the pair is the same, how it is different, and which one did something. The key gives each answer.

  2. 2nd grade

    Examples and teaching notes

    Second grade compare and contrast worksheets give your child one passage of about 130 words that sets two things side by side, such as kangaroos and koalas, or two friends who play very different instruments in the school band. Four questions ask how the pair is alike, how it differs, and which facts belong to only one of them.

  3. 3rd grade

    Examples and teaching notes

    Compare and contrast worksheets for third grade pair two things worth holding side by side: frogs and toads, two grandmothers, bats and birds. Questions ask how the pair is alike, how it differs, and which one a fact belongs to. Clue words like both, while, and unlike do some of the pointing.

  4. 4th grade Core grade

    Examples and teaching notes

    Each click picks one of the 23 passages written for this grade. Every sheet comes with its answer key. You don't need to sign up.

    Fourth grade passages compare with more moving parts: two study styles, two bakeries, day fliers and night fliers. Your child sorts similarities from differences across whole paragraphs, and wrong answers include facts true of only one subject, which is exactly the trap the skill exists to catch.

  5. 5th grade

    Examples and teaching notes

    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.

  6. 6th grade

    Examples and teaching notes

    Sixth grade compare and contrast worksheets go past listing likenesses and differences. Each passage sets two subjects side by side, such as comets and asteroids or two cousins remembering one campout. Questions ask why the author paired them, what a signal word like whereas is doing, and how details from separate paragraphs fit together.

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