How the Stanzas Fit Together is a free printable Grade 5 English worksheet on explaining how parts combine into a whole, aligned to Common Core standard RL.5.5. It prints 2 questions with an answer key on its own sheet of paper, in 25 versions, 19 of them with 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 16 of 25 · the same problems every time you open this link.

One paper per pupil

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Set 1 has all 25 in a single PDF. 19 of these 25 sets ask different questions — this skill does not have 25 questions to give. The rest reorder them, so no two pupils have the same paper in front of them.

How the Stanzas Fit Together

RL.5.5

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

What We Kept

Stanza one: We kept the table, which was too big, and the clock, which had never gone, and a tin of buttons nobody wanted, and the habit of turning lights off. Stanza two: We gave away the good chairs. We gave away the china, all of it. We gave away the piano to a school because none of us could play. Stanza three: Ten years on, I would not know the chairs if I saw them in a window on a street. But I turn the hall light off behind me every single time, and think of her.

1. How does the repetition in the second stanza work?
2. Why does the first stanza list a habit alongside objects?
3. Explain how the three stanzas fit together to make the poem's point.

2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

The Bell

Stanza one: The church has gone. They took the stone for walls and gateposts, load by load. Where the aisle was there is a field. Where the door was there is a road. Stanza two: The bell they could not sell or break. It hung in a barn for eighty years, green with the damp, out of the way, mute as a stone among the gears. Stanza three: Last spring they hung it in the school. It rings at nine and rings at three. The children do not know its age and ring it anyway, and it is free. Stanza four: So the building went, and the faith went, and the road runs where the door was cut, and still the sound the masons heard goes out at nine, and comes back, and stops.

1. Explain how the four stanzas fit together to make the poem's point.
2. Why does the poem give the bell its own stanza?
3. How does the last stanza differ in what it does from the first three?

LessonPrint · RL.5.5 · Set 16 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — How the Stanzas Fit Together

Set 16. Prints on its own sheet.

1.1. "We gave away" three times makes the disposal sound brisk and impersonal. 2. So the last stanza can reveal that the habit was the real inheritance. 3. Kept things, given-away things, then ten years on — and what lasted was the one thing that could not be kept or given.
2.1. The church goes, the bell survives unused, the bell returns to use, and the last stanza states what has and has not lasted. 2. Because the bell is the one thing that continues, so it is separated from what was lost. 3. The first three narrate; the last draws the conclusion and names what survived.

More practice for RL.5.5

Explain how the chapters or stanzas fit together into a whole.

Teaching this next? How Chapters Fit Together is the 40-minute plan for it, with the misconceptions to expect.

All Grade 5 worksheets

Last reviewed 2026-09-05. Aligned to RL.5.5 of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts.