FREE Grade 5 Reading and Writing Worksheets

We have 5 sets of free grade five reading and writing worksheets for free download below. These are full sets of resources to help grade 5 students (or other grades depending on reading levels) to practice some of the common core literacy skills needed at this grade. They come with tasks and activities included.

These Grade 5 worksheets include the reading passages needed to complete the task meaning they can be used as a stand alone activity or resource and there is no need for additional resources. As they are printable they can be laminated and used repeatedly.

We have five sets of grade five reading and writing worksheets here. the titles are listed below. You can click on the Title to jump to the relevant worksheet set.

Grade Five Reading and Writing Worksheet Set	Elements of English and skills included.
Haunted House	Reading comprehension Error correction Writing tasks Vocabulary building
Stupid Crocodile	Reading practice and comprehension Adverbs and adjectives Guided and free writing Vocabulary building
Letter of Complaint	Guided Writing Free Writing Reading Comprehension Higher order skills
Lizard and Sparrow	Higher reading skills Writing tasks Vocabulary building Inferencing skills
Mid Autumn Festival	Reading comprehension Writing both free and guided Vocabulary building Sentence construction practice.

Grade 5 Reading and Writing: A Haunted House

This Grade 5 reading resource includes a short story about a girl and her class who find an old run down house and decide to go inside to explore. It has a both a simple true and false set of questions and a set of comprehension questions to go along with the story.

It then asks students to brainstorm and discuss with their classmates and teacher to come up with the outline of their own haunted house story. Once completed they can try to write their own short story on the worksheet included. This can be used as both a process writing or free writing exercise.

If using these grade 5 reading and writing worksheets in process writing then proofreading plays a large part of that process. Proofreading is a skill that is valuable throughout a students school years., and the exercise included is a simple introduction to the skills needed to develop proofreading abilities.

Also in Grade 5 students should be developing and expanding their vocabulary, especially with adjectives. We have a simple picture to vocabulary exercise within these grade 5 reading and writing worksheets to help with this on page 3.

As well as adjectives, Adverbs should be being introduced in Grade 5 and 6. There is a sentence construction exercise included that asks students to write a sentence but include an adverb in each one.

Grade 5 Reading and Writing: The Stupid Crocodile

This grade 5 reading and writing worksheet is a levelled spin on a Aesop fable. We have called it the Stupid Crocodile. it has a short story about a deer and crocodile and has a focus of teaching adjectives and sentence construction to grade 5 students.

The first post-story task asks students to identify the adjectives for the word cloud (we also have worksheets aimed at grade 5 for both adverbs and adjectives if needed on the links) and a reading comprehension task which is designed to be be fairly simple.

Where other grade 5 reading and writing worksheets in our collection have a strong focus on the writing aspects, we have made this set a little simpler. We do have a guided writing exercise but it is heavily scaffolded with example texts and keywords included.

However, the more difficult task is the proof reading exercise on page 4 of these reading and writing worksheets set. Although it will be a vital skill later on in school, at grade 5 proofreading is a relatively new concept. We have included examples of what to look for but there will still need to be some teaching of this concept at this school grade level. There are 10 errors on the text, and in case you are new to teaching proofreading we have a tip below 🙂

Proofreading Tip: Reading aloud makes it easier to spot mistakes in texts, when we read in our head our brains often act like auto correct on your phones, and we skip over the mistakes without seeing them.

We finish the set with one last guided reading exercise ( just 100 words) with some tips and ideas above to help. One idea, if your class is of a level is to make each student a teacher and give them each others work to mark and correct. however, for this exercise we would encourage students to leave out their names to avoid embarrassment. You can use a numbering system if you wanted to .

Grade 5 Writing: A Letter of Complaint

Letter writing has been introduced in basic forms since grade 3, however from grade 4 onwards it becomes more focussed. Different text types are introduced included formal letters. Commonly students will be asked to write a letter of complaint. We have a set of grade 5 reading and writing worksheets that cover this in detail here.

There is a background story discussing the reasons why the Lee family are writing letters of complaint , and it follows up with a reading comprehension exercise and a set of comprehension questions.

We then include a page of guided writing, it asked grade 5 students to write one of the letters of complaint within the short story and includes key words to help them. This is a scaffolded activity if your students need it, as the next writing exercise is a free writing tasks.

The larger writing task can be used as a free or process writing exercise and asks students to think of an issue in their home or school that they want to complain about ( hopefully not the teacher!) This can be discussed as a whole class if needed, or students can write individual letters that could then be presented to the class or put up as a display in the classroom.

The final task is another sentence construction exercise using a mixture of more complex vocabulary.

Grade 5 Reading and Writing: The Lizard and Sparrow

This set of grade 5 reading and writing worksheets is another spin on a famous Aesop fable called the grasshopper and the ant. If your fifth graders are of a higher reading level you could also include the real story in the lesson and we have included some options for writing with different pairs of animals to show you how that could be implemented as well.

The story is fairly simple and covers the ‘‘morals” of teamwork, honesty revenge, and planning. Although you can choose your own focus, or even ask students what they think the moral of the story is.

As with the other grade 5 reading and writing worksheets on this page we also have a true and false comprehension exercise, and more difficult reading compression set of questions, some of which look for a little empathy and higher order thinking in their answers.

We also ask students to think a little about the grammar involved in the story with a quick adjective exercise and an antonym exercise (although we don’t use the grammar term) , you could introduce as the task as opposites)

This exercise asks students to finish a story using some of the words we have given (and some of their own) once completed it should have the opposite meaning to the original.

The final task is a little more tricky for grade 5 students. it doesn’t deal in the absolutes that so many stories at this level do it needs a little nuance and thought to be applied. Instead of sharing or not sharing food, the beetle and the ant work together occasionally, or sometimes, or now and then…

However if this is too much for your students, or you don’t like the idea, the words at the top can be used just as a suggestion and they can use the writing exercise to write their own version using the two previous versions as a template or as guidance.

Grade 5 Reading and Writing: Mid Autumn Festival

I was based for a significant amount of my teaching career in Hong kong, so indulge me for trying to share a little of the culture of the place. This set of five grade 5 reading and writing worksheets cover some of the traditions, history and customs around this Asian celebration.

The reading passage covers the mythology behind the mid autumn festival and the story of the God and Goddess of heaven Chang-Er and Hou Yi. The reading has been levelled so a fifth grader should be ok with it, and it comes with True and False Questions, and some more complicated reading comprehension questions following that.

Then these grade 5 writing worksheets asks students to read a short passage about a family activity on Mid Autumn, and then use that as a guide to write about another family. They have both the guide passage and a word bank to help them. (may be useful if the students have no idea what Mid Autumn festival is! )

Following on from this we have included a grade 5 free writing activity. They still have their guide and key words from the previous task but this asks them to describe what they do ( or would do) at Mid Autumn with their family.

The worksheets finish with a sentence construction activity and some simple vocab they should have learnt from the worksheet set.

Grade 5 Common Core Literacy Skills: Overview

There are websites entirely dedicated to the common core standards for grade 5, so i don’t want to reinvent the wheel with these, however we have a table below to help with fitting these grade 5 reading and writing worksheets into the common core standards, and a mini description of what they are. We have chosen the most relevant of the common cores literacy standards for grade 5 here,

However if you want detailed information on the common core literacy standards they you can check out here for the official site. we have taken 5 of the more common core standards and cross referenced them here.

Below the table we have included some links to other resources we have that are designed, or suitable for grade 5 students. Feel free to dip into those as you need.

Common Core	Resource	How it can help
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.1: Quote from the text and use inferencing answers to questions	all the above	There are comprehension questions throughout the texts, of which some require factual answers, and some address higher order thinking and reading skills.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.2 Determine themes of the story, and empathy with the characters	Lizard and Sparrow The Stupid Crocodile	Although all can be used to worth out the themes, the two Aesop Fable themed worksheets and readers are designed to allow students to infer additional meaning from them.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.3 Compare and contrast two or more characters.	The Complaint letter, The Lizard and the Sparrow and the Stupid crocodile	All of these texts offer the chance to do a character comparisons or discuss how they react to a situation.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.4 Meaning of words and their place in the text.	All Above Grade 5 literacy worksheets.	We have explicitly asks students to identify, change and use words. Although we have not touched on metaphor and simile in these.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.6 Awareness of narrators view and influences.	A complaint letter	Could be used to write a reply for each complaint from the person its aimed at.

Finally and other resources.

Grade five is a great year to teach, they are full of the enthusiasm of youth and have not entered the dice roll of the teenage years! We have countless resources for these levels which you can explore here. We have included a few grade 5 English worksheets below to get you started but there any many more to discover as well.

Adverb Worksheets – Grade 5 (With Adjectives)

Reflexive Pronouns Worksheets – Grade 5

Easily Confused Phrases in English – Grade 6