Community and Fairness Reading Comprehension Passages — Grade 3

About this resource

Third graders care a lot about what’s fair, and these community and fairness reading comprehension passages give that care somewhere useful to go. The ten Grade 3 texts, at F&P levels N–P, start inside one classroom and widen out to the whole school and the neighborhood beyond it. Along the way, this SEL reading comprehension set builds Social Awareness and the habit of asking whether a rule works for everyone.

What students practice

• Taking part in class decisions
• Following a fair process for a popular privilege
• Making rules that work for everyone
• Sharing care for shared spaces
• Representing the class voice
• Answering questions on word meaning and how a text is put together

What’s inside

• 10 passages at F&P levels N–P, from a how-to guide for class meetings to a concept explainer
• A plain-language lesson after each passage
• 5 multiple-choice items per passage, a number of them on word meaning or text structure
• 2 open-ended prompts per passage for written answers
• An answer key for the multiple-choice items on the last page
• 44 pages

A look inside

• Who Takes the Class Fish Home?: Rizal and his classmates agree on fair rules before anyone takes the class fish home over winter break.
• The Raccoon Who Made the Rules: Ridley writes woodland rules that only help raccoons, and the other animals show him a better way.
• Do Animals Know What’s Fair?: a famous experiment in which capuchin monkeys refused cucumber after a partner got grapes for the same task.
• First Come, Take Turns, or Draw Names?: three ways to share the class’s favorite beanbag, and which one feels fairest.

How to use these community and fairness reading passages in Grade 3

• Small reading groups, moving from level N up to P
• Literacy stations, with the answer key for a quick check of the multiple-choice items
• Quiet independent reading time
• A class talk on how your own room shares its space, opened with The Bulletin Board Nobody Owned or Hallway Agreements Made With the Custodian

Grade fit

Levels run from N to P, a good stretch across the third-grade year. The topics grow outward the way a third grader’s world does: the class library and the class fish, then the hallway and the student council, then a final passage on what makes any group a community. Several questions focus on word meaning and how the passage is built, so these reading passages with questions do double duty in your literacy block.

Digital version

With the interactive digital version, you share one link and students read each passage and answer the questions on any device, with no student logins. At the end they download an answer sheet to hand in.

Pairs well with

For classroom community building activities in other formats, try Community and Fairness Task Cards or Community and Fairness Role Play Scenarios.