5th Grade Reading Comprehension (2 passages, free)

When Priya found a glass bottle wedged between two rocks on the beach, she almost walked past it. Then she noticed a rolled-up paper inside.

The note was written in careful handwriting and dated twelve years earlier: “Hello from a fifth grader in Nova Scotia! If you find this, please write back and tell me where it landed.” An address was printed at the bottom.

Priya’s teacher helped her look at ocean current maps. They traced how the bottle might have drifted across the Atlantic, carried by the Gulf Stream, before washing up on the coast of Ireland.

Priya wrote a long letter. Three weeks later, a reply arrived from a woman named Claire, now a marine biologist. “That bottle,” Claire wrote, “is the reason I fell in love with the ocean.”

Deep beneath Earth’s surface, temperatures are so high that some rock melts into a thick liquid called magma.

Earth’s outer layer is broken into giant pieces called tectonic plates. Where plates pull apart or one plate slides beneath another, magma can push up through cracks in the crust.

When magma reaches the surface, it is called lava. Each eruption adds layers of cooled lava and ash, and over thousands of years these layers can build a mountain.

Not all volcanoes are on land. The Hawaiian Islands formed from volcanoes that rose from the ocean floor until they broke through the surface of the Pacific.