Fill in the Blanks Worksheet

Your passage, with the gaps drawn in

Type or paste any text. Put ___ wherever a blank should go. The sheet prints your passage with a ruled line at each marker, sized for a child's handwriting rather than for the width of the underscores you happened to type.

Add a word bank and it prints across the top of the page in columns.

The word bank changes what is being tested

With a bank, this is a matching exercise. The answer is on the page and the task is deciding where each word goes, which is comprehension and reasonable for a child who is not yet confident.

Without one, it is recall. Nothing on the page helps, and the child has to produce the word from memory or from the sense of the sentence.

Those are far apart, and the same passage can be either. The productive routine is to run it with the bank on Monday and the identical passage without it on Friday, which tells you what was actually retained rather than what could be matched.

Making the bank harder on purpose

Put more words in the bank than there are gaps. Six gaps and nine words means three distractors, and the exercise stops being solvable by elimination — which it otherwise becomes on the last two blanks, where a child can be right without reading either sentence.

Pick distractors that are plausible. A wrong answer nobody would consider is a wasted line.

Choosing what to blank out

This is where a cloze exercise is made or wasted, and it is worth being deliberate.

Blank the content words: the terms carrying the meaning, the ones you actually taught. The traditional mechanical version blanks every seventh word regardless, which produces gaps at the and and, and tests reading fluency instead of the topic you spent a week on.

Two or three gaps per sentence is usually too many. The remaining text has to give enough context to work from, and a sentence with half its words missing gives none.

On the form

A title, the passage, an optional word bank, and the Name and Date header on or off. A4 or US Letter.

Any run of three or more underscores becomes a blank, so ___ and _____ both work and both print the same width.

What it is good for

Vocabulary revision in any subject, where the passage is a summary of the topic with the key terms removed. Grammar, where the gaps are verb forms or connectives. Language learning, where the passage is in the target language and the bank is not.

It also makes a decent set of notes for a lesson: print the passage complete for yourself and gapped for the class, and the gaps are the points you want them listening for.

Print at 100% on A4 or US Letter.