Worksheet Grade 3 English Language Arts
The Marsh Below Netherby Road: A Grade 3 Worksheet
A grade 3 reading worksheet about a fictional town that dug a marsh to catch road runoff, with text-evidence, word-meaning, and apply-the-idea items.
Objectives
- Students will answer questions about a passage using details the passage states.
- Students will use nearby words to figure out what a new word means.
- Students will apply a fix described in the passage to a new place.
Vocabulary
Key words: runoff, marsh, cattail, cloudy, screen
Teacher overview
Netherby is a fictional town that stopped sending its road runoff straight into a swimming lake and dug a marsh in between instead. The passage lays out the problem, the fix, and the weekly upkeep in that order, which gives students a text where cause and effect are stated rather than implied. Third graders often believe that rain simply makes water cleaner, so items 1, 6, and 10 are worth reading aloud together after the worksheet is collected.
Student Worksheet
The Marsh Below Netherby Road
Netherby Road runs past a school and six shops. Cars drip oil on it. Wind blows grit and litter onto it. All of that sits on the road until it rains.
When rain falls, it washes the road. The dirty water runs off into a ditch. The ditch heads downhill toward Hollow Lake. Children swim in that lake in July.
Years ago the ditch ran straight into the lake. After every storm, the lake water near the ditch turned cloudy. Cloudy water is hard to see through. Swimmers did not like it, and the town of Netherby wanted to fix it.
So the town dug a marsh between the ditch and the lake. A marsh is a wide, shallow, muddy place. Cattails and reeds grow thick in it.
The marsh slows the water down. Slow water drops what it carries. Grit sinks into the mud, and bits of oil stuck to the grit sink with it. Plant roots take in some of the rest. The water that leaves the marsh is clearer than the water that came in.
A metal screen stands where the ditch meets the marsh. It catches cups, bags, and sticks. If the screen clogs, water backs up onto the road. Ms. Baptiste rakes the screen clean every Monday.
Answer each question. Use the passage.
- What washes the oil and grit off Netherby Road?
- Where does the dirty water go after it runs off the road?
- Years ago, where did the ditch run?
- What happened to the lake water near the ditch after a storm?
- What is a marsh?
- Why do grit and bits of oil sink in the marsh? Use two details from the passage.
- What does the word "cloudy" mean in this passage? Write the nearby words that helped you decide.
- What does the metal screen catch?
- What happens if the screen clogs? Tell how you know.
- A town on the far side of Hollow Lake has a ditch that still runs straight into the water. Use the passage to explain one thing that town could try.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: Rain. The second paragraph says that when rain falls it washes the road.
- Answer: Into a ditch that heads downhill toward Hollow Lake. The second paragraph states this.
- Answer: Straight into the lake. The third paragraph says so.
- Answer: It turned cloudy near the ditch. The third paragraph says this happened after every storm.
- Answer: A wide, shallow, muddy place where cattails and reeds grow thick. The fourth paragraph defines it.
- Answer: Because the marsh slows the water down, and slow water drops what it carries. Both details come from the fifth paragraph.
- Answer: Hard to see through. The passage says so in the next sentence, and "swimmers did not like it" shows why that matters.
- Answer: Cups, bags, and sticks. The last paragraph lists them.
- Answer: Water backs up onto the road. The last paragraph states this, which is why Ms.
Baptiste rakes the screen every Monday. - Answer: Answers will vary. Accept any fix drawn from the passage, such as digging a marsh between the ditch and the lake, planting cattails and reeds to slow the water, or putting a screen where the ditch starts so litter is caught first.
Differentiation
Support
Read the passage aloud once before students work, and give these students a copy with the six paragraph topics written in the margin: the road, the rain, the old problem, the new marsh, how the marsh works, the screen. Let them answer items 6 and 10 out loud to a partner who writes the answer down.
Extension
Ask students to write two sentences the town could add to a sign at the marsh, telling a visitor what the muddy field is for, and to mark which sentence of the passage each one came from.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "runoff," "ditch," "marsh," and "screen" with a sketch of a road sloping down to a lake, and demonstrate slowing water by tilting a tray of sand at two different angles. Provide sentence frames for items 6 and 9: "The grit sinks because ___," and "If the screen clogs, ___."
Extensions
Students can look for the low spot on the school grounds after a rain and write two sentences about where that water goes next. Adding their sentences to a class map of the schoolyard shows that runoff on their own ground follows the same downhill path the passage describes.