Ecosystems Animals & Plants Close Reading Comprehension Passages Differentiated

With these fun and engaging close reading passages and activities, students will learn about the living and nonliving things that interact within a variety of ecosystems. The reading passages and activities help students understand how plants and animals adapt and change to survive within their ecosystem. They are the perfect tools to help students practice close reading skills during the month of May. You could also add these activities to any science unit on ecosystems, habitats, or biomes. This week-long lesson on Ecosystems: How Plants and Animals Survive follows a close reading model and includes a teacher guide and notes to make teaching the lesson easy! 

Students will be required to use close reading skills to practice making logical inferences, citing textual evidence, and drawing conclusions from the text.

These differentiated informational text passages about ecosystems will engage students and spark interest! Through reading comprehension and close reading skills, students will learn about:

• living and non-living things that interact within ecosystems
• how air, water, shelter, space, and food must be available within an ecosystem to support life
• how plants adapt and change to survive within their environment
• how animals adapt and protect themselves within their habitats
• how living things compete against each other in order to survive
• how living things also depend on each other to survive within their environment
• how an ecosystem must meet the needs of all organisms in order to sustain life

PRINT & GO! Easily differentiate instruction with the leveled reading passages for grades 3-5. Includes everything you need to teach a week-long close reading lesson.

⭐A digital Google Classroom option is included! (Google Slides™)

⭐⭐Bundle and Save! This resource is also included in the following bundle.

Close Reading Comprehension Passages & Questions | May Bundle

Close Reading Lesson:

Ecosystems: How Plants and Animals Survive

This high-interest and engaging topic will captivate the interest of students!

Step-by-Step instructions (for teacher and students) are included that follows a close reading model.

Step 1: First Reading: Determine what the text says.

Step 2: Second Reading: Determine how the text says it.

Step 3: Third Reading: Determine what the text means.

Step 4: Written Comprehension: Write and Respond

Includes:

• Implementation Guide (Steps to Close Reading)
• Teacher Guide and Notes
• Classroom Posters
• Mark It Up! Annotation Cards
• 2 Differentiated Reading Passages
• Text-Dependent Questions
• Vocabulary Practice
• Written Response
• Close Reading Graphic Organizers

Easily Differentiate Instruction!

These close reading comprehension passages are written at 2 different levels to allow for differentiation during instruction. The content of the 2 passages is the same, but the reading levels are different. Questions about the content are the same. This makes it easy for you to provide students with the same questions and activity sheets while also allowing students to practice close reading skills on their reading level.

All answer keys are included!

⭐Note: Each reading passage is leveled with special symbols at the bottom left corner to denote difficulty levels.

This resource is aligned to the anchor standard that refers to reading text closely:

ELA Reading Standard 1: “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it, cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.”