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Reading a Grade 3 Fact Text is a free printable Grade 3 English worksheet on reading a whole information text and answering across it, aligned to Common Core standard RI.3.10. 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.

Set 20 of 25 · the same problems every time you open this link.

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

Reading a Grade 3 Fact Text

RI.3.10

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

The Salmon's Return

A salmon hatches in a river, swims to the sea, and comes back years later to the river it was born in. It finds its way home by smell. Every river carries its own mixture of soil, rock and plants, and a young salmon learns that smell before it leaves. The return journey is upstream. The fish leap waterfalls, sometimes several metres high, and they do not eat once they enter fresh water. Because it is not feeding, a salmon uses up its own body on the climb. By the time it reaches the gravel where it hatched, it is thin and worn. There it lays its eggs. Most Atlantic salmon die soon afterwards.

  1. 1. What is the author's purpose, and how do you know?
  2. 2. What is the main idea of this text, and which details support it?
  3. 3. How does it find its way home?
  4. 4. Where does a salmon hatch?
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

How Braille Was Invented

Louis Braille was blinded in an accident at the age of three. At his school, blind pupils read by tracing raised letters pressed into paper. It worked, slowly — a fingertip cannot take in a whole letter shape at once — and nobody could write that way at all. When Braille was twelve, a soldier visited the school with a code of raised dots that soldiers used to read messages in the dark. It was too complicated, but the idea of dots was right. Braille spent three years simplifying it. He settled on a cell of six dots, small enough to sit under one fingertip. He was fifteen when he finished. He was forty-three when he died, and the system was not widely accepted until after that.

  1. 1. How old was he when he finished the system?
  2. 2. What is the main idea of this text, and which details support it?
  3. 3. How old was Louis Braille when he lost his sight?
  4. 4. The author says raised letters worked slowly. What reason is given?

LessonPrint · RI.3.10 · Set 20 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — Reading a Grade 3 Fact Text

Set 20. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. To explain the salmon life cycle and what makes it remarkable — each paragraph adds a cause. 2. A salmon returns to its birth river to breed — supported by the smell, the upstream climb and the eggs. 3. By smell. 4. In a river, in gravel.
  2. 2.1. Fifteen. 2. Braille invented a readable and writable system of six dots — supported by the failure of raised letters and the soldier's code. 3. Three. 4. A fingertip cannot take in a whole letter shape at once.

More practice for RI.3.10

Read and understand harder Grade 2-3 information texts on your own.

Teaching this next? Reading Grade 3 Informational Texts is the 40-minute plan for it, with the misconceptions to expect.

All Grade 3 worksheets

Last reviewed 2026-09-05. Aligned to RI.3.10 of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts.