Best Reading Apps for 5th Grade [Updated for 2022]

Fifth grader essential literacy skills

We Reviewed Dozens Of The Best Reading Apps for 5th Grade So You Don’t Have To. Here Are Our Top Picks.

Fifth grade is a time when young students are trying hard to leave the early stages of learning and run with the big dogs in the educational world. Classroom tasks take on greater levels of cognitive complexity as students prepare for entrance into the world of secondary education.

Most parents and teachers find that it’s easy to tell which students are proficient readers and which are not. Some love to read and seem to have their noses in books every time you see them, and others avoid reading like the plague. One big reason for these discrepancies is skill at reading comprehension. No matter where your child falls on the spectrum of ability and skill, now is the time to build those comprehension skills because the further they go in school, the more they need to rely on their ability to get meaning from text.

Let’s take a quick look at the reading tasks set before fifth graders by the Common Core Standards, ways to tell if your child is on track for success, resources to build skills and Ipad apps that will help you get the job done.

Language Empires

Price: $24.99

iOS App Store

Here’s an app with a focus on language skills in general.  If you set the options to turn off the voiceover feature, it becomes an outstanding reading comprehension app!  The games offer fun practice with skills such as vocabulary, answering how, which and why questions, sequencing, making inferences, making predictions and understanding figurative language.

With over 400 questions across 5 skill areas, Language Empires is quite comprehensive. It is well worthwhile, especially for struggling students. This app is great for families, especially if there are concerns about children’s language development, and also for schools and therapy programs.

Read the full review

iTooch Fifth Grade

Price: $13.99

iOS App Store

iTooch Fifth Grade offers over 4500 exercises for math, reading, science, and health at the fifth grade level.   There are options to manage multiple students’ progress. The app is engaging and fun, and offers a lot of feedback for students.

The company offers Math, Language Arts, Health, and Science for $13.99 for each grade level, as well as an elementary bundle that covers grades 1-5 Math and Language Arts for $37.99.

Fifth Grade Reading

Price: $2.99

iOS App Store / Google Play Store

5th Grade Reading Comprehension Prep: This app offers science and social studies themed passages with companion comprehension questions.  It’s a bit more bare-bones than some of the other choices, and the reading level of the passages is on the high side for fifth graders.

If you are looking for a good, reliable reading comprehension app for fifth grade, you have found your item! This no-nonsense app gets right to the point and will efficiently help kids with their comprehension.

Read the full review

Fifth Grade Learning Games

Price: Free trial with monthly or annual subscription option

iOS App Store / Google Play Store

This app offers dozens of learning games that cover important grade 5 topics including reading, comprehension, math, and much more. Two games are included with the free version of the app, then users will want to subscribe with a monthly or annual subscription. The monthly version will run $4.99 and the annual subscription costs $29.99.

The app is very nice, because users can pick and choose lessons needed when they are needed, so if your student is studying figurative language at school, you can choose to supplement with the figurative language lesson in the app.

Reading Trainer

Price: $2.99

iOS App Store / Google Play Store

Reading Trainer improves comprehension by tackling reading fluency. When students read more easily, they are free to retain and process more of the content of the text. This app offers 12 different games and exercises designed to improve coordination of eye movements, increase rapid recognition of letters and numbers, and more.

The app has won several awards and has been documented to improve reading fluency.

Spark Reading for Kids

Price: Free trial with subscription options

iOS App Store

Find passages that are highly interesting and engaging for your fifth grader to practice reading comprehension skills with this app. It offers leveled text that takes about 8-10 minutes to read, then has questions to assess comprehension.

The app allows parents or teachers to monitor multiple students’ work and progress. Subscriptions that unlock all activities are available for $6.99 per month or $23.99 annually.

Read & Spell Game Fifth Grade

Price: Free

Google Play Store

Read & Spell Game Fifth Grade offers handy teaching and review of over 100 crucial fifth grade vocabulary words. Kids will be able to go over their meanings, synonyms, spelling, and usage. The app includes voice overs that help students become familiar with the words, proofreading exercises, as well as other games and activities.

This comprehensive reading activities app is a perfect review for kids who are reading on grade level, and also makes a great tool to help students who struggle with grade-level reading. Check it out today!

Common Core Connections

A good starting place is to understand what is expected of students by the end of grade five in the area of reading.  Many areas around the country have aligned their curriculums to a national standard called the Common Core Standards.  The wording varies from state to state, but the skills remain the same.  Here’s a quick look at what many schools expect students to do by the end of fifth grade:

  • Read text at the fourth and fifth grade levels, recall details from the text, summarize and make inferences.
  • Identify the main idea, topic or theme and its supporting details.
  • Explain how different characters or other aspects of the passage interact and affect one another.
  • Understand grade level general vocabulary words, such as admiration, chaos, furious, and scuffle, as well as subject-specific vocabulary like dissection, metamorphic, neutral and compromise (Source: EDL Core Vocabularies).
  • Apply all phonics and word analysis rules to decode larger words.
  • Analyze text structure and read multiple texts on the same topic, noting similarities and differences.
  • Locate information in text efficiently.
  • Understand point of view, plot, character development, setting, and other aspects of text.

The complete list of the Common Core State Standards can be found at http://www.corestandards.org/, and each state has a list that has been adopted by their own Department of Education as well.

What Does It Take To Succeed?

Reading success is closely tied to school success, and also to a student’s willingness to read for pleasure.  It’s always a good idea to make sure your child’s skills are keeping pace with the demands of school placement, and imperative that you investigate any reluctance to read or apparent difficulty immediately.  Most reading problems begin in elementary school and become apparent by grade five, so this is an ideal year for a thorough reading check up.

Reading Fluency

Start by checking your student’s ability to read text quickly and accurately.  Find both a fiction and a nonfiction book at the fifth grade level.  You can use a tool provided by Scholastic (http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/) to enter titles and get information about the reading level.

Have your student read a passage for one minute out loud from each book.  Time the reading and keep track of any words that were misread or caused a great deal of hesitation.  Note where the reader started and stopped reading, then count the words that were read.

An average student near the end of grade five should be able to read approximately 139 correct words per minute out loud (Source: http://www.readnaturally.com/pdf/oralreadingfluency.pdf).  If your student’s score is markedly lower than this, it’s time for some more detailed investigation about the reasons, and you should talk to a teacher, tutor or reading specialist for more detailed assessment.

Understanding The Text

Reading fluently is only part of the story, though.  Your reader needs to get information from the text while reading, or the entire process is a waste of time.

Check your child’s comprehension by having him or her read a chapter or section from a fifth grade level book, then ask a few questions about the content.  Ask at least five questions about details from the text and two questions that call for speculation. These are inference questions, where the answer was not stated directly in the passage, but enough information was given to make a good guess.  Examples would include questions about the weather if the events took place outdoors, questions about what might happen next in the story, or what might have led up to the situation discussed.

Finally, ask your reader to retell the story in five to ten sentences or summarize the nonfiction information in a paragraph.  This will help you discover if sequencing and summarizing skills are developing normally.

Online Resources For Reading Comprehension

Need more information or other online resources? Check out these links: