Oral reading fluency passages and WCPM calculator

Tom had a red kite with a long blue tail. On Sunday, he took it to the park with his dad. The wind was strong, and the trees bent and swayed.

Tom held the string and ran across the grass. The kite went up, and then it fell down. He tried again. This time his dad held the kite up high and let it go. Up it went, over the trees and into the sky.

A girl from the next street came to watch. Her name was Ava. Tom showed her how to pull the string when the kite dipped. Soon Ava had a turn, and the kite stayed up for a long time.

When the sun went down, they wound up the string. Tom was tired, but he was happy. He wanted to come back next week.

After the rain, Mina went to the small garden behind her building. Water shone on the leaves, and the path was soft under her shoes. She had planned to pick tomatoes, but the fruit was still green. Instead, she decided to tidy the bed before the next shower arrived.

Near the fence, she found a wooden plant label lying in the mud. Its writing had almost disappeared. Mina wiped it with her sleeve, but she could only make out the first letter. She put it beside the empty flowerpot and checked the other labels. Two more were loose.

Her neighbor, Sam, came through the gate carrying a small bag. Inside were a pencil, some string, and three clean pieces of wood. They made new labels together. Mina wrote the plant names while Sam tied each label to a short stick. They left enough room around the stems to reach the soil without stepping on the plants.

By the time they finished, the clouds had begun to clear. Mina placed the old labels on a shelf to dry. Sam brushed the dirt from his hands and looked at their work. There were no ripe tomatoes to take home that day, but the garden was ready for another visit. Mina closed the gate carefully and tucked the pencil into her pocket.

On Saturday evening, Leo carried a notebook and a folded star map to the hill near his home. His sister, Nora, brought a blanket and a small lamp. They wanted to draw what they could see above the town, but the sky was still too bright when they arrived.

They spread the blanket on a dry patch of grass and opened the map. Nora held down one corner while Leo placed a stone on the other. A breeze lifted the paper between their hands. They laughed, moved closer together, and waited while the lights below them came on.

After a while, Leo noticed a bright point above the trees. He drew a dot in his notebook and marked where the trees stood beneath it. Nora found two more points farther to the left. Neither was sure how the shapes on the map matched the view, so they kept their first drawing simple.

A thin cloud crossed the sky and hid one of the dots. Leo left its place on the page rather than rubbing it out. When the cloud passed, the light appeared again. Before going home, they added the date and a sketch of the hill. They agreed to bring the notebook on their next visit and compare the two drawings.

For three years, students at a hillside school have kept a record of the weather from a small station on the roof of the science building. The equipment is modest. A rain gauge collects water in a narrow tube, and a thermometer sits inside a ventilated white box that shields it from direct sunlight. Every morning at eight o'clock, two volunteers climb the stairs to read both instruments and enter the measurements in a shared notebook.

At first, the readings seemed unremarkable. Warm days followed cool ones, and storms arrived without much warning. Over time, however, the students noticed something curious. Their rain totals were consistently lower than the figures published by the airport across the valley, even after storms that had soaked both places equally.

Their teacher encouraged them to investigate rather than assume the airport was mistaken. The students examined the gauge and discovered that an air vent nearby was blowing across the opening of the tube. On windy days, some of the falling rain was pushed aside before it could be collected. The difference was small for a single storm, but it accumulated over months.

The class moved the gauge to the opposite corner of the roof, away from the vent, and compared the two locations for several weeks. The new position matched the airport far more closely. In their report, the students explained that an instrument is only as reliable as the place where it is installed. They also added a note to the old records, so that anyone reading them later would understand why the early totals were too low.

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