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Classroom activity Grade 7 Art & Music

Foundry Hill Lead-Line Door Hanger Icon Design

A grade 7 art activity where students design clear icons for a door hanger urging a fictional town's homes to check for lead water lines.

Objectives

  1. Students will design a set of clear icons for a public water-safety message.
  2. Students will compare a historical and a present-day way of changing a community.
  3. Students will explain what action their door hanger asks a household to take.

Vocabulary

Lead service line
A lead service line is an old water pipe made of lead metal that connects a house to the water main. Lead can get into the drinking water, so these pipes are being dug up and replaced across the country.

Also: icon, door hanger, sanitation reform

Teacher overview

Many older homes still connect to the water main through a lead service line, and lead is unsafe to drink. EPA estimates that about 4 million lead service lines remain in United States water systems, and a federal rule now pushes utilities to replace nearly all of them within 10 years. Utilities often hang a door hanger to reach households that a mailed letter would miss. This activity has students design the icons for such a door hanger for the fictional town of Foundry Hill, an old factory town where lead lines are common. The activity connects art to civics: students first compare a historical way of changing a community with a modern one, then design a door hanger as today's version of that public-health message.

Activity Directions

  1. Before class, post the lead-line fact sheet. Arrange students in pairs and give each pair a door-hanger template and pens.
  2. Open with a short compare step. In the 1800s, sanitation reformers used printed posters and pamphlets to push cities toward clean water and sewers. Today, utilities use door hangers, texts, and websites for lead-line campaigns. Ask pairs to name one thing the two approaches share and one way they differ.
  3. Give the design brief: the door hanger must use clear icons, not long text, to tell a household three things: your home may have a lead line, lead is unsafe to drink, and a free test is available.
  4. Pairs sketch three or four icons (15 minutes), such as a pipe symbol, a warning mark, and a "free test" tag, then arrange them on the template with a short headline (10 minutes).
  5. Post the door hangers and run a critique round: each pair reads another pair's hanger and states, in one sentence, what action it asks a household to take.
  6. End the activity once every pair has posted a hanger and named the action on another pair's design.
  7. Close with the debrief questions below.
Foundry Hill Lead-Line Door Hanger Icon Design — Grade 7 Art & Music
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Lead-line fact sheet. A lead service line is the pipe that connects a home to the water main. Lead is unsafe to drink. EPA estimates that about 4 million lead service lines remain in United States water systems. A federal rule requires utilities to replace nearly all of them within 10 years. Utilities act when lead in tap water goes above 15 parts per billion, and that level drops to 10 parts per billion in 2027. Foundry Hill is an old factory town, so many of its homes may still have lead lines.

Debrief questions

  1. What do the 1800s sanitation posters and pamphlets and today's lead-line door hangers have in common, and how are they different?
  2. Why do icons work better than long text on a door hanger?
  3. What action should your door hanger ask a household to take first, and why?

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: Both the 1800s pamphlets and today's door hangers are ways a community pushes itself toward safe water by informing households directly; they differ in tools and speed, since modern campaigns can add texts, websites, and free testing that printed pamphlets could not.
  2. Answer: Icons work better than long text on a door hanger because a person glances at it for only a moment; a clear pipe symbol, warning mark, and free-test tag communicate faster than a paragraph.
  3. Answer: The action the hanger should ask for is to request the free lead-line test, since a household cannot fix a problem it has not confirmed, and testing is the first step the rule encourages.

Differentiation

Support

Give these pairs a template with the three message zones outlined and one example icon drawn. Provide a short word list (pipe, test, warning) to label their icons.

Extension

Ask pairs to design a matching set of icons for a follow-up hanger that explains what happens after a lead line is found, and to explain how the two hangers work together as one campaign.

ELL supports

Provide the fact sheet with images and short sentences. Because the deliverable is mostly icons, let students communicate through drawing, and allow the headline to be a short phrase they rehearse aloud first.