The following standards offer a focus for instruction each year and help ensure that students gain adequate exposure to a range of texts and tasks. Rigor is also infused through the requirement that students read increasingly complex texts through the grades. Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade-specific standards and retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades.

Standards in this domain:

• RL.5.1.
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• RL.5.2.
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• RL.5.3.
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• IA.1.
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• RL.5.4.
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• RL.5.5.
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• RL.5.6.
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• RL.5.7.
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• RL.5.8.
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• RL.5.9.
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• RL.5.10.

Key Ideas and Details

• RL.5.1. Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• RL.5.2. Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.
• RL.5.3. Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
• IA.1. Employ the full range of research-based comprehension strategies, including making connections, determining importance, questioning, visualizing, making inferences, summarizing, and monitoring for comprehension.

Craft and Structure

• RL.5.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.
• RL.5.5. Explain how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem.
• RL.5.6. Describe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

• RL.5.7. Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).
• RL.5.8. (Not applicable to literature)
• RL.5.9. Compare and contrast stories in the same genre (e.g., mysteries and adventure stories) on their approaches to similar themes and topics.

Range of Reading and Complexity of Text

• RL.5.10. By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poetry, at the high end of the grades 4–5 text complexity band independently and proficiently.