The Community Garden — Reading Comprehension

This passage titled "The Community Garden" supports 5th grade students in mastering the essential skill of quoting accurately from text when explaining both explicit content and inferences as required by CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.1. The narrative depicts Leo participating in a community effort to transform a vacant lot into a productive garden space. Students must identify the specific quotation "This area had been filled with litter and weeds" to answer a question about explicit information while also connecting details including "Leo's family had signed up for their own section, and he had been selected to choose what they would grow" to make an inference about his responsibility. This passage effectively teaches students to distinguish between what the text states directly and what can be reasonably inferred through careful analysis. The questions guide students to return to the text for precise evidence, reinforcing the standard's emphasis on using accurate quotations to support comprehension. The community engagement theme introduces relevant environmental and agricultural vocabulary while creating a positive scenario about neighborhood collaboration that naturally encourages close reading and evidence-based reasoning about both explicit content and implied meaning.