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Grade 6 reading passages with questions

5 original 6th grade passages with five to seven questions, an answer key and vocabulary. Print them or read them big.

5 passages of 224 to 282 words. A long river that shaped a civilization, the layers of the Earth, how vaccines work and how the Romans built their roads, plus a story set in one evening in an apartment building.

Passages

How to use them in 6th grade

The Nile text is a good model for a social studies read: ask students to underline one effect of the dam that helps farmers and one that hurts them. For the science texts, have students turn each paragraph into a one-line caption, then read the captions in order as a summary. For the story, have students trace how the main character feels at the start, middle and end, and cite a detail for each.

What the text looks like

Sentences that carry two or three ideas, domain words such as fertile, mantle and antibodies, and questions that need the whole text rather than one line.

Every passage in the set: Kindergarten, Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 7, Grade 8. Or see the whole list, check any text with the readability checker, or time a read with the fluency timer.

Questions

What does 6th grade reading level mean here?

Each passage here is checked with the Flesch-Kincaid formula, and for this grade the result has to be 4.5 to 8. It is a formula, so use your own judgment, and your own students, to decide whether a text is right.

Can I print them?

Yes. Every passage has Print student copy, with lines to write the answers on, and Print with answers, which fills them in.

Where do the passages come from?

They were written for Peabody Teach. None is copied from a book, a test or another site.