Scholastic Success With Reading Comprehension Grade 5

Getting Through Scholastic Success With Reading Comprehension Grade 5 Without Losing Your Mind

I picked up a used copy of Scholastic Success With Reading Comprehension Grade 5 at a thrift store for three dollars, mostly because my kid was struggling with longer passages and I needed something cheaper than a tutoring session. It's a workmanlike workbook, not magic, and it shows you exactly how much effort you have to put into it. The book is divided into reading passages followed by questions. Some passages are narrative, some informational, and then there are the ones that are so dry they could double as government manuals. The questions test things like main idea, supporting details, inference, vocabulary in context, and sequence. That's the standard fifth-grade lineup, and this book covers it without surprises.

What You Actually Get With Scholastic Success With Reading Comprehension Grade 5

There are roughly twenty-five to thirty passages in the book depending on the edition, each between one and two pages. After each passage there are eight to ten questions. The answer key is in the back, which is good because your kid will get some of these wrong and you need to correct them without spending twenty minutes figuring out what the question is even asking. The difficulty curve is gentle. It starts at a moderate level and creeps up, but "hard" for this book still means readable for most fifth graders without accommodations. That's not a criticism, just a boundary condition. If your kid is reading well below grade level, this won't fix that. It assumes the kid can decode the text and just needs practice with the question types. I'll give you a specific thing that tripped me up when we first started using it. The vocabulary questions sometimes ask you to pick the meaning of a word based on how it's used in the passage. A few of these words are fairly advanced for fifth grade, and the answer choices include synonyms that feel interchangeable if you're skimming. The workaround I found was to have my kid underline the sentence containing the target word, read it aloud, and then try to substitute each answer choice into that exact sentence. The one that preserves the original meaning is the right answer. It takes longer but it cuts the guess rate down dramatically.

How To Use This Book Without Wasting It

The way I structured it was one passage per session, three to four times a week. Not every day. Doing it daily felt like punishment and the quality of the reading dropped. Three or four times gave us time to review mistakes without the whole thing becoming a chore. Here's the actual routine: Read the passage silently. This is important because some kids rush straight to the questions without finishing the passage. They'll miss key details that show up later. Have them read it once all the way through before touching a single question.

Do the questions without looking back at the passage on the first pass. This forces them to actually retain information while reading instead of treating the text like an open-book search engine. When they hit a question they can't answer from memory, that's the signal to go back and re-read that section. Check answers against the key. Don't skip this. The learning happens in the correction phase, not the answering phase. Go through each wrong answer and figure out why it was wrong. Was it a vocabulary issue? A misread detail? An inference they couldn't support? For the questions they got wrong, have them rewrite the correct answer in their own words. This forces processing instead of passive recognition. They'll often say "I just guessed" and then realize they actually have no idea why the right answer is right. That's the moment where the actual learning happens.

The whole process for one passage, including correction, takes about fifteen to twenty minutes for a typical fifth grader. If it's taking forty minutes, they're probably stuck on a vocabulary word or the passage is too hard for their current level. In that case, either look up the word together or move to an easier passage.

Things This Book Won't Do For You

It won't teach reading. It teaches comprehension of passages you can already decode. If your kid can't read fluently, this is the wrong tool. You need a phonics or fluency program first, and then you can bring this in. Using it too early just creates frustration because the child can't access the text well enough to practice the skill being tested. It also won't prepare a kid for every type of standardized test out there. The question formats here are fairly traditional. If the state test uses drag-and-drop items or adaptive questioning, this book isn't going to help with the interface. It helps with the underlying skills, which is different. Some passages are better than others. The informational texts about science and social studies tend to be higher quality because they actually teach something while testing. The narrative passages are sometimes generic to the point of being forgettable. Your kid might finish three of those in a row and not remember a single character name. That's fine, just don't expect literary analysis from a workbook that isn't asking for it.

One edge case I ran into: the book sometimes has duplicate question types that feel identical. We did two passages in a row where the questions were essentially the same pattern. My kid started recognizing the pattern instead of reading the passage. The fix was to mix the order, do a couple of different passages from other worksheets in between, and then come back to the book later. Breaking the pattern recognition forced them to actually engage with each new text again.

Where To Find It

Scholastic Success With Reading Comprehension Grade 5 is widely available. Amazon usually has it in stock for around eight to twelve dollars for the paperback. Walmart and Target carry it too. Used copies show up on eBay, ThriftBooks, and local Facebook Marketplace listings regularly, sometimes for under five dollars. Scholastic's own website sometimes has sales, and the Scholastic Book Fair at your kid's school is a decent place to find it at full price without the shipping cost. There isn't an official free digital version that I know of, so any site claiming to have a PDF is probably sketchy. The physical book is cheap enough that it's not worth the risk. Also, workbooks are harder to use on screens anyway. Kids write in them, and that's part of the process.

A Few Practical Notes

Don't do all twenty-five passages in a row. That's a month's worth of work and doing it in one weekend defeats the purpose. Spacing it out over three to four weeks gives better retention because the brain needs gaps to consolidate what it learned. If your kid consistently misses inference questions, that's a specific gap. Inference means reading between the lines, and some kids never learned that skill explicitly. You can supplement with conversation. After a passage, ask "what do you think happened before this scene?" or "why do you think the character did that?" without pointing to the text. It builds the habit of drawing conclusions from evidence, which is exactly what inference questions ask for. Similarly, main idea questions trip up kids who focus on details. The trick is to have them summarize the passage in one sentence before looking at the questions. If they can't do that, they probably didn't grasp the structure of the text. That's more fundamental than the workbook can fix alone.

The answer key has the correct answers but not explanations. That means you'll occasionally disagree with the key on a vocabulary or inference question. I've seen this happen. TheScholastic editorial choices aren't always perfect. When that comes up, talk it through. If the kid's reasoning is sound and defensible, sometimes the answer key is wrong or at least debatable. I'd rather a kid learn to argue their reading than memorize that a multiple-choice key is infallible. This book is a solid resource for fifth-grade reading comprehension practice. It's not exciting, it doesn't do anything fancy, and it won't transform a struggling reader on its own. But used consistently and with actual engagement during the correction phase, it does what it says it will do. That's probably more than you can ask for at this price point.