Lesson plan Grade 10 Art & Music
Verwood Treatment Plant Infographic: A Grade 10 Scale-Design Lesson
A grade 10 art lesson where students design a scale infographic of a fictional water treatment plant, building the layout as a ratio drawing with labeled call-outs.
Objectives
- Students will apply technical-illustration conventions to design a readable infographic of a treatment process.
- Students will build a scale drawing of a plant site and interpret its scale as a ratio.
- Students will calculate what share of a site a row of treatment basins occupies.
Vocabulary
- Sedimentation
- Sedimentation is the step where water sits almost still in a big basin so the heavy clumps of dirt can sink to the bottom. The cleaner water on top then moves on to the filters.
Also: technical illustration, scale bar, call-out
Teacher overview
A water treatment plant runs raw water through a fixed order of steps, and a good infographic lets a viewer follow that order at a glance. This lesson treats the infographic as a technical-illustration problem: students build a scale drawing of a plant site, place the five treatment stages in sequence, and label each with a call-out. The design work rests on a scale calculation, so students practice turning "1 inch represents 30 feet" into an exact drawing size and a scale ratio. A common misconception is that a scale drawing can shrink some parts more than others to fit the page; students should leave knowing that a single scale must govern every measured element, or the diagram misrepresents the plant.
Procedure
Hook (5 min): Project an aerial photo or schematic of a treatment plant and ask how a designer would make a complex, multi-step process readable in a single image. Collect the conventions students already know, such as arrows for flow.
Mini-lesson (13 min): Teach the illustration conventions the infographic will use: a consistent left-to-right flow, leader lines connecting call-out labels to parts, a scale bar, and clear figure-ground separation. Pair this with the treatment sequence in order: rapid mix, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, and the clearwell, where chlorine disinfects the water before it leaves the plant. Model one scale conversion on a practice basin that is not on the handout: a 120-foot basin at 1 inch to 30 feet draws at 4 inches.
Guided scale work (15 min): In teams of three, students complete handout questions 1 through 3, sizing the site and the basin row at the given scale.
Independent work and drafting (14 min): Students complete questions 4 and 5, then begin a draft layout of the infographic on grid paper, placing the five stages in order with room for call-outs.
Formative check and closure (3 min): As an exit ticket, students answer one item: a basin is 60 feet long; how long is it drawn at 1 inch to 30 feet? Scan for the answer of 2 inches and the correct division before dismissal.
Student Handout
The Verwood Regional Water Treatment Plant (a fictional plant) occupies a rectangular site 240 feet long and 180 feet wide. You are designing a scale infographic on a poster where 1 inch represents 30 feet. Use these figures.
- At 1 inch to 30 feet, how long and how wide is the site on your poster?
- Write the scale as a ratio of 1 to a number, using the same unit on both sides. (Convert 30 feet to inches first.)
- The five stages sit in a row of basins with these lengths: rapid mix 10 feet, flocculation 40 feet, sedimentation 90 feet, filtration 50 feet, and the clearwell 30 feet. Find the total length of the basin row in feet, and its length on your poster at 1 inch to 30 feet.
- The basin row is 220 feet long and runs along the 240-foot length of the site. What percent of the site's length does the basin row occupy? Round to the nearest whole percent.
- Your infographic needs a call-out label for each of the five stages, plus one for the incoming raw water and one for the finished water leaving the clearwell. How many call-out labels is that in total?
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: 8 inches by 6 inches. The length is 240 divided by 30, or 8 inches; the width is 180 divided by 30, or 6 inches.
- Answer: 1 to 360. Thirty feet equals 360 inches, so 1 inch to 30 feet is the ratio 1 to 360.
- Answer: 220 feet, about 7.3 inches on the poster. The basins total 10 plus 40 plus 90 plus 50 plus 30, or 220 feet; dividing by 30 gives 7.33 inches, about 7.3 inches.
- Answer: 92 percent. 220 divided by 240 equals 0.9166, which rounds to 92 percent.
- Answer: 7 labels. Five stage labels plus one for raw water and one for finished water equals 7 call-out labels.
Differentiation
Support
Provide a pre-scaled site rectangle already drawn at 8 inches by 6 inches so students place stages inside a correct frame rather than building it from scratch. Supply the basin lengths on a reference strip and a worked example of one scale conversion beside question 1.
Extension
Ask students to add a second scale bar in metric and to recompute the site and basin-row dimensions at a scale of 1 inch to 25 feet, then explain in writing how choosing a different scale changes both the drawing size and how much label detail will fit.
ELL supports
Give a labeled diagram of the treatment sequence with the five stage names and a simple icon for each, with the last one labeled "clearwell (disinfection)," and a bilingual card for "scale," "ratio," "call-out," and "sedimentation." Allow students to label their draft with the provided stage names rather than writing definitions from memory.