De Paul University: Center for Urban Education: Letter to Grandmother [Pdf]

"Letter to Grandmother" is a one page, fictional, reading passage about a family of early settlers who moved west. A boy writes a letter to his grandmother telling her about their new life on the plains. It is followed by constructed-response questions which require students to provide evidence from the story; it includes: determining the lesson or theme of the story and explaining how they came to that inference. This passage aligns with Common Core Anchor Reading Standards 1 requiring close reading, textual evidence, and main idea.