The Rooftop Garden — Reading Comprehension
An original grade 2 passage with 5 questions that move from literal recall through inference to vocabulary. A comprehension sheet made only of recall questions tests memory rather than understanding, so the later questions here deliberately cannot be answered by copying a line out of the text.
Grade 2 Standard RI.2.1
The Rooftop Garden — Reading Comprehension
Name:Date:Score:
- The Rooftop Garden
On top of the tallest building on Pine Street, there is a garden. Mr. Tanaka started it eight years ago with four buckets of soil and some tomato seeds.
Now the roof holds more than sixty containers. Neighbors come up the stairs on Saturday mornings to water the plants and pull weeds. In August, everyone takes home a basket of vegetables.
Mr. Tanaka says the hardest part was carrying the soil up eight flights of stairs. The easiest part, he says, was finding people who wanted to help.
- 1Where is the garden?
- 2How did the garden start?
- 3When do neighbors come to help?
- 4What did Mr. Tanaka find hardest, and what did he find easiest?
- 5What does the last sentence tell you about the neighborhood?
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Answer key (5 answers)
- 1. On the roof of the tallest building on Pine Street.
- 2. With four buckets of soil and some tomato seeds.
- 3. On Saturday mornings.
- 4. Hardest: carrying soil up eight flights of stairs. Easiest: finding people who wanted to help.
- 5. That many people there were willing to help — it is a friendly, cooperative place.
What to watch for when you grade this sheet
- Answering from memory rather than going back to the passage.
- Copying a whole sentence where the question asks for one detail.
- Skipping the inference questions because the answer is not stated anywhere in the text.
One thing that helps
Ask the child to underline the part of the passage their answer came from. For the inference questions there will be no single line to underline, and noticing that is the lesson.