How do Adrian's feelings change in the story?
Analyze and Evaluate Information and Ideas · TELPAS Grades 4–5 reading. The correct answer, and the reasoning behind it.
Reporting category 3: make inferences, draw conclusions, and think about why the author wrote a text and how it is built.
Read the passage. Then answer the questions.
The Heron on Mill Street
All summer, the brick wall beside the laundromat on Mill Street had been plain and gray. Then Ms. Perez, an artist who lived nearby, asked the neighborhood to help her paint a mural on it. The mural would show the river that ran through town, with fish, turtles, and birds.
Adrian signed up right away. On the first morning, Ms. Perez gave him a brush and pointed to a tall shape she had sketched in pencil. “This is a great blue heron,” she said. “It’s yours.”
Adrian hesitated. He had never painted anything bigger than a sheet of paper. What if he ruined it? Slowly, he dipped his brush into the blue-gray paint and began.
Up close, his heron looked terrible. The feathers were blotchy, and one leg was thicker than the other. Adrian put down his brush and frowned.
Ms. Perez walked over. “Come with me,” she said. She led him across the street, and they turned around to look.
From there, the blotches looked like soft, real feathers. The heron seemed to be standing in the water, about to catch a fish.
“Murals are made to be seen from far away,” Ms. Perez said. “Sometimes you have to step back to see what you’ve done.”
Adrian grinned. Then he hurried back across the street to fix the heron’s other leg.
The question
Choose the best answer.
How do Adrian's feelings change in the story?
- from excited to bored
- from proud to angry
- from calm to scared
- from worried to confidentCorrect answer
Why “from worried to confident” is correct
The student must track a character's feelings across the whole story. Adrian hesitates and frowns at the start, but he grins and hurries back to work at the end. Neither feeling word is in the story, so the student has to infer them from actions such as frowning and grinning.
Why the other answers are wrong
- from excited to bored — Adrian is never bored; he hurries back to keep painting.
- from proud to angry — He is not proud at the start, and he is not angry at the end.
- from calm to scared — This is the opposite of what happens.
Practice more of this
More reading practice for Grades 4–5, or see the TELPAS practice test for 4th and 5th grade.
This is an independent study resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Texas Education Agency or the official TELPAS program. All questions here are original practice material written to match the published test design.