Do you struggle to engage your students in reading comprehension practice? I’ve got you. Finding high-quality free reading comprehension worksheets can be hard. Reading comprehension doesn’t come naturally to all students. It’s up to us to challenge our more gifted readers to grow while helping our struggling readers to flourish alongside them. Keeping reading skills practice fresh and fun is half the battle! Today I’m sharing two FREE print resources that will keep your students engaged while fine-tuning their reading comprehension skills! I promise that they will beg for more!

Free Reading Comprehension Worksheets Can Be Fun!

These free reading comprehension worksheets with mystery pictures encourage students to practice essential skills. With this set of reading comprehension worksheets, students will practice summarizing and identifying point of view. Then, the matching mystery pictures require students to color based on their answer choice.

Who doesn’t love to color, right? Trust me when I say students love these activities! Students work hard to ensure they have the correct answers before they begin to color. This helps students slow down and answer intentionally. Students want to ensure they have the correct answer before they color.

I promise it’s not your average reading comprehension worksheet!

Practicing Summarizing

For upper elementary, summarizing is an essential skill that requires lots of practice to ensure mastery. Luckily, the Free Reading Comprehension Worksheets target summarizing!

The worksheets consist of two short passages that follow the SWBST summary model (Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then). After students read each passage, they will answer multiple choice questions about specific parts of the story in relation to SWBST.

Practicing the SWBST model helps students learn how to break down a story and focus on the most important parts. It gives them a simple structure to follow when analyzing parts of a story. It also makes writing summaries way less overwhelming. Plus, it builds a strong foundation for reading comprehension that they’ll keep using as texts get more complex.

Point of View Practice

Another reading skill included in the free reading comprehension worksheets is point of view. Teaching point of view—specifically the difference between 1st and 3rd person—helps students become stronger readers and writers. When they understand who’s telling the story, they’re better at identifying character thoughts, feelings, and bias.

This free resource includes a variety of short texts for students to practice with. Specifically, it includes 3 short fiction stories, a poem, and a diary entry. A quick graphic organizer is embedded at the top of the worksheet as a reminder of 1st and 3rd person point of view, as well as the correct pronouns. Students will read each text, and then answer multiple choice questions as they work.

Identifying point of view from a variety of texts also improves students’ ability to write with a clear voice. The more students practice point of view early, the deeper their understanding of narrative structure will be. Additionally, learning point of view sets the stage for analyzing perspective in more complex texts later on.

Perfect for sub plans!

Need a day off or a sick day at home? This is a great resource to leave for a substitute! They are the perfect no prep reading activity to leave last minute or to quickly write into your lesson plans as needed.

Luckily, these free reading worksheets can be used in a variety of ways. In addition to sub plans, these can be used as a quick skill review, test prep, or even a summarizing and point of view assessment.

Students will have so much fun with the self-checking mystery pictures! Not only will they have a nice piece of artwork to show off, but they will feel more confident with their reading comprehension skills!

Download for FREE today!

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I have created an entire set of Reading Comprehension Passages for the entire year for grades 3-5. They span a variety of reading skills and strategies. You can find them all here.

Save these Fun and Engaging Free Reading Comprehension Worksheets

Don’t have time to download now? That’s okay! Just pin this to your favorite classroom Pinterest board so you can come back to it when you need some new ideas for engaging your students in reading comprehension. These reading skills and strategies mystery pictures are perfect for test prep review, too!