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Worksheet Grade 3 English Language Arts

Snow on the Pellard Range: A Grade 3 Reading Worksheet

A grade 3 reading worksheet about a fictional town whose lake is fed by melting snow, with text-evidence, word-meaning, and apply-the-idea items.

Objectives

  1. Students will answer questions about a passage using details the passage states.
  2. Students will use nearby words to figure out what a new word means.
  3. Students will apply a reason from the passage to a town the passage does not describe.

Vocabulary

Snowpack
The snow that piles up in the mountains over the winter. As it melts in spring and summer, it acts like a giant water tank feeding rivers and reservoirs.

Also: melt, depth, stream, valley

Teacher overview

Cobblehurst is a fictional valley town whose lake is filled by snow that melts off the hills above it, which ties the winter snowfall on those hills to the town's water supply the next summer. The passage states that link plainly enough for students to locate and quote, and it introduces a snow surveyor who measures snow depth with a marked pole. Third graders often assume a lake is refilled only by the rain that falls directly on it, so item 10 is worth discussing aloud after the worksheet is collected.

Snow on the Pellard Range: A Grade 3 Reading Worksheet — Grade 3 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Snow on the Pellard Range

The town of Cobblehurst sits in a valley. Above the town stand the Pellard Range hills. Snow falls on those hills all winter. It piles up deep. The piled snow is called snowpack.

Cobblehurst drinks from Kettle Lake. The lake sits at the foot of the hills. In spring the air warms up. The snowpack starts to melt. The melt runs downhill in small streams. Those streams feed Kettle Lake.

A snow surveyor named Ravi Chandrasekar checks the snowpack. He hikes up the hills once a month. He pushes a long pole down into the snow. Marks on the pole show how far down it goes. That number is the depth. He writes the depth in a notebook.

A deep snow year is good news for the town. The snow melts slowly. The melt keeps coming into July. Kettle Lake stays high all summer.

A thin snow year is a warning. The melt runs out by June. By August the lake is low. Then the town asks people to water their yards less.

Ravi sends his notes to the town office in March. The town reads them. Then the town makes a plan for summer.

Answer each question. Use the passage.

  1. Where does the town of Cobblehurst get its water?
  2. What is snowpack?
  3. When does the snowpack start to melt?
  4. How does the melt get from the hills down to Kettle Lake?
  5. What does Ravi push down into the snow?
  6. What does the word "depth" mean in this passage? Write the nearby words that helped you decide.
  7. What happens to Kettle Lake in a deep snow year? Use two details from the passage.
  8. In a thin snow year, why is Kettle Lake low by August?
  9. Why does the town want Ravi's notes in March and not in July? Tell how you know.
  10. A different town drinks from a lake that is filled by rain, not by snow. Use the passage to explain one thing that would be different for that town.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: From Kettle Lake. The passage says Cobblehurst drinks from Kettle Lake, at the foot of the hills.
  2. Answer: The snow that piles up deep on the hills all winter. The passage names it in the first paragraph.
  3. Answer: In spring, when the air warms up. The second paragraph states this.
  4. Answer: It runs downhill in small streams, and those streams feed the lake.
  5. Answer: A long pole with marks on it. The third paragraph says he pushes it down into the snow.
  6. Answer: How far down the pole goes, which is how deep the snow is. Helpful nearby words are "marks on the pole," "how far down it goes," and "that number."
  7. Answer: It stays high all summer. Two supporting details are that the snow melts slowly and that the melt keeps coming into July.
  8. Answer: Because the melt runs out by June, so no more water comes down the streams to refill the lake through the rest of the summer.
  9. Answer: So the town can make a plan for summer before summer starts. The passage says the town reads the notes and then makes a plan.
  10. Answer: Answers will vary. Accept any reason drawn from the passage, such as that the town would not have to wait for melting, that a rain-fed lake could rise at any time of year, or that a thin snow winter would not warn that town about a low lake.

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: snow falls, melt runs down, the surveyor, deep year, thin year, the notes. Let them answer items 7, 9, and 10 out loud to a partner who writes the answer down.

Extension

Ask students to write two sentences the passage would need if the town wanted to warn people in a thin snow year, and to mark which existing sentence made them think so. Require one of the two sentences to name a month.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "snowpack," "melt," "valley," and "depth" with a sketch of hills above a lake and, if a ruler is handy, a demonstration of measuring depth in a bowl of sand. Provide sentence frames for items 7, 8, and 9: "In a deep snow year, the lake ___," "The lake is low because ___," and "The town wants the notes in March so that ___."

Extensions

Students can keep a two-week weather chart of rain and snow at school and write one sentence each Friday about what that week would have meant for Kettle Lake. Comparing the charts at the end makes the passage's link between winter weather and summer water supply concrete.