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How Actions Drive the Story is a free printable Grade 3 English worksheet on explaining how what a character does shapes the events, aligned to Common Core standard RL.3.3. It prints 2 questions with an answer key on its own sheet of paper, in 25 versions that each ask different questions, so no two pupils in the class work from the same page. Print it from the browser or download it as a PDF — no account, no email.

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Set 1 has all 25 in a single PDF. All 25 sets ask different questions.

How Actions Drive the Story

RL.3.3

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

The Fox and the Well

A fox leaned too far over a well and fell in. The water was shallow, but the walls were smooth and far too high to climb. He was still sitting there when a goat came by and looked down. "Is the water good?" asked the goat. "The best I have ever tasted," said the fox. "Come down and see." The goat jumped in. The fox climbed onto the goat's back, sprang out, and trotted off. "Wait!" called the goat. "How do I get out?" "You should have thought about that," said the fox, "before you jumped."

  1. 1. What happened between the goat jumping in and the fox trotting off?
  2. 2. Describe the fox's motivation. What does he want?
  3. 3. What does the goat's question at the start tell you about him?
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

The Last Letter

Every Thursday for six years, Mr Ellis posted a letter to his sister in Canada. Then the letters started coming back. Address unknown. He kept writing them anyway. He put them in a shoebox instead of the postbox. When his neighbour Ada asked why, he said, "Because the day I stop writing is the day she is really gone." Ada went home and looked up the town on a map. It took her three weeks and eleven phone calls to find the new address. The shoebox held ninety-two letters. They posted them all on the same day.

  1. 1. What do Ada's actions tell you about her?
  2. 2. Describe Mr Ellis's motivation for writing letters he could not send.
  3. 3. What happened between the letters coming back and them all being posted?

LessonPrint · RL.3.3 · Set 23 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — How Actions Drive the Story

Set 23. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. The fox climbed onto the goat's back and sprang out of the well. 2. He wants out of the well, and he is willing to trap the goat to manage it. 3. He is trusting — he asks about the water rather than about how the fox got there.
  2. 2.1. She is persistent and quietly kind — three weeks and eleven calls, without being asked. 2. Writing kept his sister present for him — stopping would have meant losing her. 3. Mr Ellis kept writing into a shoebox, and Ada spent three weeks finding the new address.

Last reviewed 2026-09-05. Aligned to RL.3.3 of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts.