Class 5 English Worksheets with Answers (Grade 5) - Free PDF 2026-27

Santoor, first published in June 2025 and reprinted for 2026-27, under NEP 2020 and NCF-SE 2023. It replaced the Marigold series, so material written against Marigold 5 will not match your child's book chapter for chapter.

One thing that catches parents out: Class 3 English is also called Santoor. Two different books, same title - exactly as Class 3 and Class 4 both use Maths Mela. When buying a workbook or downloading material, check the class number rather than the title, because a Class 3 Santoor resource will look plausible and cover entirely the wrong content.

The Class 5 book runs to five units - Let's Have Fun, My Colourful World, Water, Ups and Downs, and Work is Worship - across ten chapters with two self-assessment sections. These worksheets are organised by skill rather than by unit, so they stay usable whichever edition your school issued. Grammar, comprehension and writing do not change with the textbook; only the passages do.

One thing above all: comprehension stops being a search-and-copy exercise.

Up to Class 4, most comprehension questions are retrieval - the answer is a sentence in the passage, and the skill is finding it. From Class 5, roughly half become inference questions: the answer is not stated anywhere and has to be reasoned from what is. A passage says a girl checked the sky four times and her plastic sheet was too small; the question asks what she was worried about. Nothing says "she was worried about rain".

This is why a child who was strong at comprehension suddenly is not. They are still doing what always worked - hunting for the sentence - and there is no sentence to find. It looks like the reading got worse. It did not; the questions changed.

The fix is to name the two kinds explicitly, which is why the comprehension sheet here labels every question (R) or (I) and includes an exercise on telling them apart. Once a child can identify which kind they are facing, inference questions stop feeling unanswerable. And one more thing worth telling them: "the passage does not tell us" is sometimes the correct answer. Children almost never believe that, so they invent something instead.

Because of what happens next. At Class 6, every subject starts demanding written answers of a paragraph or more - Science asks why something happens, Social Science asks you to explain a cause, and both want it in connected prose rather than a list.

Almost nobody teaches that structure explicitly. It is assumed to develop, and for some children it does. For a lot of others, Class 6 arrives and their answers are a pile of true statements in no particular order, marked down for reasons they cannot identify.

The structure is simple and teachable: a topic sentence saying what this is about, two or three sentences supporting it, and a closing line. That is the same shape a good Science answer takes. A child who can build a paragraph in Class 5 walks into Class 6 with an advantage that has nothing to do with how much Science they know.

Our post on the Class 5 to Class 6 jump covers the wider transition - one teacher becoming many, subjects becoming abstract, and marks starting to reward explanation over recall.

Two, and neither is usually taught as a priority because neither causes a question to be answered wrongly - they just leak marks steadily.

Subject-verb agreement. "The bunch of keys are on the table" is wrong, and the reason is that the subject is bunch, not keys. Children match the verb to the nearest noun rather than to the actual subject. This costs a mark in written answers in Science, Social Science and English alike, and it gets more expensive in Class 6 when answers get longer and there are more verbs to get wrong.

Homophones. Their, there and they're. Its and it's. Your and you're. These survive a spellcheck completely, because each is a correctly spelled word sitting in the wrong place. Nothing flags them, and they appear in every written subject.

Both are fixable with a test rather than a rule. For agreement, ask "what is this sentence actually about?" For it's, replace it with "it is" and see whether the sentence survives - "the dog wagged it is tail" is obviously nonsense, so the answer is its. Those two tests remove most of the errors permanently, which is a better return than any amount of general grammar practice.

• On comprehension, ask which kind of question it is before answering. Retrieval means go and find it; inference means reason from what is there. Naming it is most of the battle.
• For every inference answer, ask "what in the passage makes you think that?" An inference must be supported. Unsupported, it is a guess, and guesses become confident wrong answers that are hard to undo later.
• Insist on a three-line plan before any story. Beginning, middle, end. A story that stops rather than ends is almost always unplanned, and planning takes under a minute.
• Do not correct every error in writing. Pick one or two - structure or tense consistency usually. A child corrected on everything writes shorter and safer, which is the opposite of the goal.
• Keep sessions to around thirty minutes, which is realistic at ten - see how long a child can concentrate by age.

If reading itself is still effortful rather than comprehension being the issue, our post on a child weak in reading English explains how to tell the two apart in about two minutes.