My Pet Hamster Reading Comprehension Worksheet

Comprehension starts long before chapter books — it starts the first time a young reader can say what a short story actually told them. This My Pet Hamster reading comprehension worksheet gives a first grader four tidy paragraphs about a boy named Roman and his hamster, Pip, and then asks five plain questions about what the text said. Pip is small and soft with tan and white fur. She lives in a big cage with a wheel to run on and a tunnel to hide in, she eats seeds and dry pellets and little bits of carrot, she sips water from a bottle, and she sleeps by day and wakes at night. Every sentence is written to first-grade measures, so a child who is still building fluency can read the whole page on his or her own.

This 1st grade reading comprehension worksheet is a three-page, no-prep printable. Page one carries the illustrated story, page two carries the questions, and the last page is the answer key. Students read the 96-word passage, then answer five multiple-choice questions with three fill-in-the-bubble choices each. The questions are drawn from all four paragraphs, so a child cannot answer them from the opening sentences alone, and every answer is stated plainly in the text. Print it, hand it out, and the reading, the questions and the grading are already done for you.

What’s Included

• 1 print-ready PDF worksheet
• Answer key
• A 96-word original story about a pet hamster and 5 multiple-choice questions

Three things make this My Pet Hamster reading comprehension worksheet worth the ten minutes it takes. First, the subject is a pet, which is a topic almost every first grader already cares about, so the child is reading for something rather than reading to finish. Second, the passage is measured on grade rather than guessed at, which means the sentence length and the vocabulary match what a first grader meets on a reading assessment. Third, the five questions ask what, where and when, so students practice going back into the text to find evidence instead of answering from memory.

Ways to Use It

• Read the story aloud once, then let students reread it quietly and answer on their own.
• Ask students to underline the sentence in the story that proves each answer.
• Use the five questions as a quick reading check in a small group or a guided reading rotation.
• Have students draw and write one sentence about a pet they know or would like to have.

My Pet Hamster is also one of nine stories in the My Pets Reading Comprehension Test Collection, a kindergarten reading comprehension pack that puts all nine pet stories together with one combined answer key, so you can plan a whole unit on pets from a single download.

Related Resources

• My Pet Cat Reading Comprehension Worksheet
• My Pet Dog Reading Comprehension Worksheet
• We Want a Pet Reading Comprehension Worksheet
• Story Elements Song