Cause and Effect Nonfiction Worksheet

How can I use cause and effect reading passages (PDF)?

Use cause and effect reading passages (PDF) to help your children explore the relationship between different events, and see how one thing might lead to another.

This resource features a passage about goats and their kids, with various causes and effects scattered throughout. Children will have to identify the causes and effects for themselves, and pull them out to put them in the worksheet space below. This helps them to get a broader understanding of cause and effect, and see how prolific they are in real life. Everything is interconnected!

Use this worksheet as an individual or group task, or set it as a homework assignment. It downloads as a handy PDF, so you can print off as many copies as you need. This means it doesn’t matter if you’re teaching a class of three or thirty!

Use this resource to target the curriculum content descriptor AC9E6LA04 - understand that cohesion can be created by the intentional use of repetition, and the use of word associations

Resources to use with our cause and effect reading passages (PDF)

Explore the definition of cause and effect with our handy Teaching Wiki, packed full of great examples to help clarify the topic. It makes a brilliant read before teaching a lesson on the subject, as it features ways to help you teach the point.

You might want to explore this alternative worksheet, which features a fiction passage, rather than a non-fiction one. As such, it partners really well with this worksheet, as the two together help children to explore causes and effects in different scenarios.

Or, for more visual learners, you could use these pictorial cards, which come with questions on causes and effects hidden in the scenes.

Using our resources is a great way to help alleviate the pressure of lesson planning. With these in your back pocket, you won’t have to worry about making your own materials, which can be time-consuming and stressful.

How can I identify cause and effect?

When trying to identify cause and effect, ask yourself whether something could happen without something else. In your mind, remove one event from the timeline, and try and see how that would affect other goings-on. If another event wouldn’t happen, then that will be the effect of the first event, which is the cause.