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Where Food Goes

5th grade nonfiction passage about the human body: 179 words, seven questions, an answer key and vocabulary.

5th grade nonfiction the human body 179 words

Where Food Goes

When you eat a sandwich, your body has to break it into tiny pieces before it can use it. This job is called digestion. It takes many hours, from the first bite to the end of the trip.

Digestion begins in the mouth. Your teeth chew food into small bits, and saliva makes it wet and starts to break it down. When you swallow, the food goes down a tube called the esophagus. Muscles squeeze it along, which is why you can swallow even when you are upside down.

The food drops into the stomach. Strong muscles churn it, and stomach juices, which contain acid, break it into a thick liquid.

Next, the liquid moves into the small intestine, a long, coiled tube. Here the body takes in nutrients, the useful parts of food. The nutrients pass through the walls of the intestine into the blood, and the blood carries them to every part of the body.

What the body cannot use moves into the large intestine. It takes back water, and the rest leaves the body as waste.

Questions

  1. What is digestion? in the text

  2. What happens to food in the mouth? in the text

  3. What is the esophagus? in the text

  4. What does the stomach do to food? in the text

  5. What happens in the small intestine? in the text

  6. What does the large intestine do? in the text

  7. Why does food have to be broken into tiny pieces? think about it

Words to know

digestion
the way the body breaks food down so it can use it
saliva
the wet liquid in your mouth that helps break down food
esophagus
the tube that carries food from your mouth to your stomach
nutrients
the useful parts of food that the body needs to grow and have energy
intestine
a long tube where the body takes in nutrients and water

How to use it

  1. Press Read it big (or B) to put the text on the projector, or Full screen (F) to fill the whole screen.
  2. Ask the questions one at a time and use Show answer when the class has decided. A shows or hides every answer.
  3. Print student copy for the class, or Print with answers for yourself.

Ideas for class

  • Before reading, put digestion, saliva, esophagus, nutrients and intestine on the board with their meanings from the Words to know section and have students predict what the text will be about.
  • Read it aloud once while students follow along, then have them reread it alone or with a partner. At a calm 100 words a minute it takes about 2 minutes to read aloud.
  • Use the Read it big button (or B) to put the text on the projector, and Show answer on one question at a time so the class commits to an answer first.
  • Question 7 asks the reader to infer. Ask students to point to the words in the passage that led them to their answer.
  • Ask students to write one question the passage did not answer, then look for the answer in a book or on a classroom screen.
  • Print the student copy for independent work and keep the answer-key copy for yourself.

Related

Questions

What reading level is "Where Food Goes"?

It was written for 5th grade. It has 179 words and works out to a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of about 4.9. That is a formula's estimate from sentence length and syllables, and it is not a Lexile or a guided reading level, so check it against your students.

What do the questions ask?

There are seven. 6 ask for something the text says directly and 1 ask the reader to work something out from clues. Each has an answer in the key, and the answers are written as a teacher would accept them, not as the only possible wording.

How long does it take to read?

About 2 minutes read aloud at 100 words a minute. For a one-minute fluency check, paste it into the fluency timer and use the word count.

Can I print it?

Yes. Print student copy gives the passage, the questions with lines to write on, and the word meanings. Print with answers gives the same page with the answers filled in. Both are made in your browser.

Is this passage from a published book?

No. It was written for Peabody Teach, so there is no book to buy and no login to read it.

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