Beavers Build a Home: Reading Comprehension Worksheet

Read the passage

The same text as the printed sheet, with the same paragraph numbers the questions refer to — for reading aloud from a screen or a board.

1. A beaver is a large animal with brown fur and a wide, flat tail. It lives in streams and ponds. A beaver is also a very good builder.
2. Beavers cut down small trees with their strong front teeth. Those teeth never stop growing. Chewing on wood keeps them from getting too long.
3. First, beavers build a dam across a stream. They pile up sticks, branches, and mud. The dam holds back the water, and a pond forms behind it.
4. Next, they build a home in the middle of the pond. This home is called a lodge. Its doors are under the water, where wolves and other hunters cannot reach. Inside, there is a dry room above the water.
5. In winter, ice covers the top of the pond. The beavers stay warm in the lodge. They swim under the ice to reach branches they stored in the fall. Then they eat the bark.

The questions

The answers, and the paragraph each one comes from, are on the last page of the PDF — not here, so a student reading on screen cannot see them.

1. What do beavers use to cut down trees?
   1. their flat tails
   2. their strong front teeth
   3. their front paws
2. What do beavers build first?
   1. a lodge
   2. a dam
   3. a tunnel
3. In paragraph 4, what is a lodge?
   1. a beaver's home
   2. a kind of tree
   3. a pile of stones
4. What would happen to the pond if the dam broke?
   1. The pond would get bigger.
   2. The water would run out, and the pond would shrink.
   3. The pond would freeze right away.
5. Why do beavers store branches in the fall? (written answer)

How the reading level was set

This passage was written to the Grades 1–2 band: Short sentences (ten words or fewer on average, none longer than fourteen), everyday words a beginning reader can sound out or already knows, and one idea per paragraph. The one or two topic words a child may not know — lodge, yeast — are explained in the passage itself. The band is a judgement, not a readability score — no Lexile measure or grade-level formula has been applied. These are the counts it rests on, taken from the text itself:

Words:

152

Sentences:

17

Average sentence:

8.9 words

Longest sentence:

14 words

Words of seven letters or more:

7%

Sources for the facts in this passage

The passage is original writing, not an excerpt or an adaptation. Its facts were checked against these pages:

• Smithsonian's National Zoo — Beaver — Front teeth that grow for life and are worn down by chewing; dams of sticks and branches sealed with mud; lodges with underwater entrances and a living space above the water line; branches stored on the pond floor for winter.
• National Park Service — Acadia's North American Beaver — Beavers build dams and lodges that make ponds, lodges have underwater entrances, and food is stored for the winter.

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Or see every passage, grouped by reading level, on the reading comprehension worksheets page.