Lesson plan Grade 9 Art & Music
Reading a Kettleford Water Bill: A Grade 9 Type Hierarchy Poster
Grade 9 art students design a plain-language poster that explains a confusing water bill, building type hierarchy and writing clear explanatory captions.
Objectives
- Students will design a type hierarchy that leads a reader to the most important line on a bill first.
- Students will write short explanatory captions that translate billing terms into plain language.
- Students will test their layout by timing how fast a partner finds the amount due.
Vocabulary
Key words: type hierarchy, legibility, alignment, tiered rate, caption, hierarchy
Teacher overview
Many residents cannot tell from their water bill how much water they used or why the price changed, because the bill crowds every number into the same size and weight of type. This lesson treats the bill as a design problem. Students study one deliberately cluttered sample bill from Kettleford, a fictional city, and redesign one section as a clear explanatory poster that a new customer could understand in seconds. The lesson joins two skills that professional information designers use together: building a type hierarchy so the eye lands on the right number first, and writing plain-language captions that explain a billing term without jargon.
Procedure
Hook (5 min): Project the cluttered sample bill for the fictional city of Kettleford and give students ten seconds to find the total amount due. Most will not find it in time. Ask what made it hard, and list their answers, which usually include same-size type, no spacing, and no labels.
Direct instruction: type hierarchy and legibility (12 min): Define type hierarchy, legibility, and alignment. Show how designers signal importance through size, weight, and position rather than decoration, and how a strong hierarchy usually has three levels: the one thing to read first, the supporting numbers, and the fine print. Demonstrate how consistent left alignment and generous space between groups make a dense page scannable.
Analyze the sample bill (8 min): In pairs, students mark up the Kettleford sample with highlighters. This fictional bill has an $18 base service fee, a first tier charging $3 for each 1,000 gallons of the first 3,000 gallons, a higher second tier charging $5 for each 1,000 gallons above that, 7,000 gallons used, and a total due of $47 ($18 + $9 + $20). Students circle the single most important line and number the levels of hierarchy they think the bill should have.
Studio: redesign one section as a poster (18 min): Each student redesigns the charges section on 11x17 paper as a clear poster panel. The panel must show a three-level type hierarchy, one plain-language caption explaining what a tiered rate means, and consistent alignment. Circulate and prompt students to justify why their largest element deserves to be largest.
Legibility test and exit ticket (7 min): Pairs swap posters and time how many seconds it takes to find the total due; the target is under five seconds. As an exit ticket, each student writes the one caption from their poster that they think does the most work to help a confused reader, and names the design choice that makes their total due easy to find.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Differentiation
Support
Provide a template with three empty boxes already sized large, medium, and small so students place content into an existing hierarchy rather than inventing spacing from scratch. Offer a word bank of plain-language phrases for the tiered-rate caption.
Extension
Ask students to design a small companion graphic that shows how the second tier's higher price is meant to discourage heavy use, and to write a caption explaining that incentive in one or two sentences without taking a side on whether the policy is fair.
ELL supports
Pre-teach base fee, tier, and amount due with a labeled example and a home-language gloss where possible. Provide caption sentence frames such as "A tiered rate means the price ___ after you use ___." Allow captions to be drafted as labeled callouts rather than full paragraphs.
Extensions
Students can collect the actual billing inserts their own utility mails out, identify one that is hard to read, and propose a redesign that keeps every required number but improves the hierarchy and captions. This connects the studio skill to a document families in their community actually receive.