5th grade reading · Informational Text · RI.5.2

5th grade nonfiction reading

What is this skill?

Fifth graders are expected to read an informational text closely and to say what it claims, how it proves the claim, and where the claim stops. They find the main idea of a whole passage and of a single paragraph, explain how a comparison clarifies a hard idea, separate fact from opinion, and draw a conclusion the text supports but does not state. The five passages here run about 235 to 260 words, the length of a short magazine article.

They are "The Deepest Place on Earth," "How Vaccines Train Your Body," "The Hidden Life of a Sand Dune," "Machu Picchu: City in the Clouds" and "The Surprising Intelligence of Crows." Questions ask why the author mentions Mount Everest in the first sentence, how snailfish survive the pressure, what antibodies do, what three things a dune needs, why the purpose of Machu Picchu is still uncertain, and why the author ends with "The old insult, it turns out, was not very smart." Shorter reads cover the tongue and taste buds, the size of Jupiter, the word "composting," what you can conclude about the printing press, and a comparison of blood vessels to a highway. A task sorts sentences about wolves into the main idea and its evidence, another puts the steps from earthquake to tsunami in order, and one asks which sentence about the Golden Gate Bridge is an opinion and not a fact.

Why it matters

Children this age start to meet claims, in textbooks and online, that they have to weigh. Asking "what is the evidence, and is this a fact or an opinion" is the beginning of being a careful reader of everything, from a school report to an advertisement.

It is also what makes studying work. A student who can pick the main idea out of a section and list the evidence has already made a good set of notes, and fifth grade is when notes start to count.

Common mistakes

  • Choosing a true statement that is not the main idea. A passage on crows may mention one famous experiment, but the main idea covers the whole passage. Ask, "Would the other paragraphs fit under this?"
  • Treating an opinion that sounds confident as a fact. "The most beautiful ever" is a judgment, while a date or a length can be checked. The test is: could you prove it wrong?
  • Skipping the purpose of a comparison. A highway for blood vessels is there to make a hard system easier to picture, and a child should be able to say so.
  • Leaning on prior knowledge for a conclusion. "Can you conclude" means from this text. If the passage does not support it, however true, it is not the answer.

How to help at home

  • Read a news article for kids with your child and ask for one fact and one opinion from it. Many pieces mix them.
  • Have your child explain a comparison from a book in their own words, then decide if it helped.
  • Make a quick outline of a page: one main idea and three pieces of evidence. It takes five minutes and shows exactly what they understood.
  • Practice with directions or processes, like how a recipe turns out, and ask for the steps in order without looking.

Worked examples

These are real questions from the Tutorsaurus 5th grade nonfiction reading practice, with the answers worked out.

  1. Example 1

    What is the main idea of this paragraph?

    The human tongue has about 10,000 taste buds, and each one is replaced every one to two weeks. Children have more taste buds than adults, which is one reason they often find strong flavors like broccoli more bitter than grown-ups do.

    Choices: Adults like broccoli, Taste buds are small, Broccoli is bitter, The tongue has many taste buds that constantly renew, and kids have more than adults

    Answer: The tongue has many taste buds that constantly renew, and kids have more than adults. The paragraph is about taste buds: how many there are, how they renew, and how kids differ from adults.

  2. Example 2

    Put the steps of how an earthquake creates a tsunami in order.

    The pieces, mixed up: The waves slow and grow taller as they reach shallow water near shore / The sudden shift pushes a huge amount of water upward / A section of the ocean floor suddenly moves during an earthquake / Waves spread out across the ocean at the speed of a jet plane

    Answer: A section of the ocean floor suddenly moves during an earthquake → The sudden shift pushes a huge amount of water upward → Waves spread out across the ocean at the speed of a jet plane → The waves slow and grow taller as they reach shallow water near shore. The floor moves, water is pushed up, waves race across the ocean, and then they rise up near shore.

  3. Example 3

    Why does the author include the comparison to a highway?

    Blood vessels are the body's highway system. Arteries are the wide, fast lanes carrying blood away from the heart. Capillaries are the tiny side streets where oxygen is delivered to each cell. Veins are the return roads bringing blood back.

    Choices: To explain how to drive, To show blood moves slowly, To make a complex system easier to understand with something familiar, To describe city planning

    Answer: To make a complex system easier to understand with something familiar. Comparing vessels to roads uses something familiar to explain how blood travels.

Try a 5-question mini-quest

Question 1 of 5

Free, no sign-up. Hand the screen to your child or play it together. Nothing is saved.

Why does the author mention Mount Everest in the first sentence?

The Deepest Place on Earth If you dropped Mount Everest into the deepest part of the ocean, its peak would still be more than a mile underwater. That place is the Challenger Deep, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. It is nearly 36,000 feet down, almost seven miles. The conditions there are extreme. No sunlight reaches that depth, so it is completely dark. The water is just above freezing. Most striking of all is the pressure. At the bottom of the trench, the weight of the water above presses down with a force of about eight tons per square inch. That is like having fifty jumbo jets stacked on top of you. For a long time, scientists assumed nothing could live in such a place. They were wrong. Expeditions have found strange creatures thriving in the darkness: pale shrimp-like animals called amphipods, sea cucumbers, and snailfish with soft, jelly-like bodies that do not crush under pressure. Tiny microbes live in the mud itself. Only a handful of people have ever been to the bottom. The first were two explorers in 1960, who stayed for just twenty minutes. Since then, special submarines built to withstand the pressure have carried a few more. Robots have made many additional trips, bringing back photos, mud, and samples of the strange life below. We have better maps of the surface of the Moon than of the deep ocean floor. The Challenger Deep is a reminder of how much is still waiting to be discovered on our own planet.

Related skills