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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 Night the Lamp Went Out

Grace's father kept the lighthouse. On the worst night of the winter, the lamp went out. He was ill in bed. Grace was eleven. She carried the oil up ninety-seven steps in the dark, twice, because the can was too heavy to lift full. Her arms shook so much on the second trip that she had to sit down halfway. She trimmed the wick the way she had watched a hundred times. She struck the match on the fourth try. By the time the light swung out across the water, three ships had already turned back. Grace never knew whether she had been in time. She decided not to think about it.

  1. 1. What did Grace do between carrying the oil and striking the match?
  2. 2. How do Grace's actions contribute to the sequence of events?
  3. 3. Describe Grace's character. What traits do her actions show?
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. Describe Mr Ellis's motivation for writing letters he could not send.
  2. 2. What happened between the letters coming back and them all being posted?
  3. 3. What do Ada's actions tell you about her?

LessonPrint · RL.3.3 · Set 3 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — How Actions Drive the Story

Set 3. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. She trimmed the wick. 2. Because she carried the oil and lit the lamp, the light swung out across the water again. 3. Determined and capable — she climbed ninety-seven steps twice while shaking, and finished the job.
  2. 2.1. Writing kept his sister present for him — stopping would have meant losing her. 2. Mr Ellis kept writing into a shoebox, and Ada spent three weeks finding the new address. 3. She is persistent and quietly kind — three weeks and eleven calls, without being asked.

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