3rd Grade Fables and Folk Tales worksheets

About this worksheet

Fables and folk tales use a compact story to teach a lesson about how people behave, and Common Core's RL. 3. 2 asks third graders to determine that central message themselves and explain how key details support it. A child can follow the plot of a fable, such as a tortoise beating a boastful hare, and still struggle to state the lesson in their own words or explain why a character acted a certain way. This worksheet prints one fable or folk tale, from Aesop or from China, Ghana, Russia or the Haudenosaunee people, retold in fresh, original prose at a Grade 3 reading level, and asks ten questions about it: the lesson it teaches, what a character did and why, which detail supports the lesson, how a character changed, something that did not happen, and a word's meaning from context.

Encourage your child to point to the sentence in the fable that proves the lesson, not just retell the plot from memory.

What your child will learn

• Determine the central lesson or moral of a fable
• Explain a character's motivation for their actions
• Describe how one event leads to a result
• Support a stated lesson with details from the text
• Define a word using context from the fable