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Lesson plan Grade 8 Careers & CTE

Guarding Glasslake: A Source Water Protection Career Lesson

A 50-minute grade 8 careers lesson in which students act as source water protection specialists, mapping five watershed hazards and designing a monitoring plan.

Objectives

  1. Students will map five land uses in a watershed and show how water carries pollution from each toward the reservoir.
  2. Students will rank watershed hazards by risk and defend the top-ranked choice.
  3. Students will design a monitoring plan naming a measurement, a sampling point, and a sampling frequency.

Vocabulary

Watershed
A watershed is all the land where rain that falls will drain to the same stream, river, or lake. Everyone lives in a watershed, no matter how far from the water they live.

Also: source water, monitoring plan, sampling point, land use

Teacher overview

A treatment plant is the last barrier between a watershed and a tap, yet it is not the only one, and many utilities employ someone whose whole job is protecting the water before it ever reaches the intake. This lesson introduces that role by handing students a fictional reservoir watershed with five ordinary land uses in it and asking them to decide which ones deserve attention first. The misconception it addresses directly is the belief that a treatment plant can remove anything, so what happens upstream does not matter; students learn that some contamination is expensive or impossible to treat, and that a watershed is the whole area of land draining to a lake rather than the lake itself.

Procedure

Framing the job (7 min). Tell students that Dunmorrow, a fictional town, draws its drinking water from Glasslake Reservoir, and that the town employs one source water protection specialist. Describe the job in plain terms: the specialist inspects land in the watershed, samples streams that feed the reservoir, works with landowners, and recommends where the town should spend money to keep contamination out. Ask students to name one thing on land near a lake that could end up in the water, and collect three or four answers.

Reading the watershed (10 min). Read the watershed description in the Student Handout aloud while students sketch the reservoir, the two inlet streams, the ridge line, and the five numbered land uses. Emphasize that water runs downhill toward the reservoir, so a hazard's position on the map matters as much as what it is. Circulate and check that every sketch shows the ridge line enclosing the drainage area.

Ranking the hazards (10 min). In groups of three, students rank the five hazards from highest to lowest risk to drinking water and prepare one reason for their top choice. Push groups past "it is dirty" toward specific reasoning: distance to the water, how often the hazard releases something, what the substance is, and whether treatment can remove it.

Designing the monitoring plan (15 min). Students complete the Student Handout individually. Their plan covers one hazard only, and it must name a measurement, an exact sampling location, a normal sampling frequency, and a triggering event that would prompt an extra visit. Remind students that a specialist chooses measurements that can be taken with field equipment or a small laboratory budget, not everything imaginable.

Share out and formative check (8 min). Ask each group to state its top-ranked hazard and its chosen measurement in one sentence. Use this as the formative check: if fewer than half the groups can name a measurement that would actually detect their hazard, pause and model one aloud, connecting a manure pile to bacteria testing at the stream that drains it. Close by naming three related jobs: source water protection specialist, watershed technician, and water quality sampler.

Guarding Glasslake: A Source Water Protection Career Lesson — Grade 8 Careers & CTE
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

The Glasslake watershed. Dunmorrow is a fictional town of about 6,000 people. Its drinking water comes from Glasslake Reservoir. Two streams feed the reservoir. Otter Brook enters at the north end, and Cutter Creek enters at the west end. A ridge line runs around the whole valley, and every drop of rain that falls inside that ridge line drains to the reservoir. Five land uses sit inside the watershed. All five were invented for this lesson.

  • Hollis Farm. A dairy farm with about 90 cows on the hillside above Otter Brook. Manure is stored in an open pile roughly 200 feet from the brook.
  • The Route 9 crossing. A state highway crosses Otter Brook on a bridge. The road is salted all winter, and tanker trucks use it.
  • The old town landfill. Closed in 1978, unlined, and located on the slope above the north inlet. Rainwater soaks through the buried trash.
  • Glasslake Marina. About 40 boats dock here, with a fueling pump on the dock and restrooms on shore.
  • The Timber Ridge logging road. A dirt road on a steep, recently cut slope draining into Cutter Creek. Bare soil washes off it in heavy rain.

Answer each question on your own paper.

  1. Draw a sketch map of the watershed. Show the reservoir, both streams, the ridge line, and all five land uses, and draw an arrow from each land use showing the direction water would carry pollution.
  2. Rank the five land uses from highest risk to lowest risk to Dunmorrow's drinking water, and give one reason for your top-ranked choice.
  3. For your top-ranked hazard, name the one measurement you would take to detect it reaching the water.
  4. Name the exact place you would collect that sample, and explain why that spot rather than the middle of the reservoir.
  5. How often would you sample at that point during normal conditions?
  6. Name one event that would make you sample sooner than your normal schedule.
  7. Name one action the town could take to reduce the risk from your top-ranked hazard.
  8. Name the job title of the person who would carry out that action.

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: Accept any sketch showing the reservoir, Otter Brook entering at the north, Cutter Creek entering at the west, an enclosing ridge line, and all five land uses with arrows running downhill toward the water. Arrows from the farm, the highway crossing, and the landfill should point toward Otter Brook or the north inlet; arrows from the logging road should point toward Cutter Creek.
  2. Answer: Accept any ranking defended with specific reasoning. Strong answers usually place the manure pile or the unlined landfill first, because both sit uphill of an inlet and release contamination continuously rather than occasionally. A reason such as "it is close to the brook and rain moves it every time it storms" is stronger than "it is dirty."
  3. Answer: Accept any measurement that would actually detect the chosen hazard. Reasonable pairings include bacteria testing for the manure pile, chloride or conductivity for road salt, turbidity for the logging road, and fuel-related sampling near the marina dock.
  4. Answer: Accept any specific sampling point downstream of the hazard and upstream of the reservoir, such as Otter Brook just below the farm. Students should explain that a sample taken in the open reservoir is diluted, so it cannot show which land use the contamination came from. If the student chose the marina, accept a point in the reservoir right at the dock or fuel pump, compared with a sample taken away from the dock.
  5. Answer: Accept any regular schedule the student can defend, such as monthly year round or every two weeks during the growing season. The frequency should match how often the hazard releases something.
  6. Answer: Accept any triggering event tied to the hazard, such as a heavy rain, spring snowmelt, a manure spreading day, a truck crash at the bridge, or a fuel spill report at the marina.
  7. Answer: Accept any realistic action, such as fencing cattle out of the brook, moving or covering the manure pile, planting a buffer strip of grass and trees along the stream, adding a spill containment kit at the fueling dock, or seeding and matting the bare logging slope.
  8. Answer: Accept any plausible role, such as the farmer working with a conservation district technician, a public works crew, a marina operator, or a contractor hired by the town. Students should name a person or organization that could actually do the work rather than "the government."

Differentiation

Support

Provide a partly drawn map with the reservoir, both streams, and the ridge line already sketched, so students place only the five land uses and the arrows. Give a short menu of possible measurements for question 3 and let students choose and justify one rather than generating it from memory.

Extension

Ask students to write a one-paragraph recommendation to the Dunmorrow town board arguing for spending the year's protection budget on a single hazard, using their ranking and their monitoring plan as support.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "watershed," "ridge line," "hazard," and "sampling point" with the sketch map, and let students label the map in their first language before writing in English. Allow questions 2 through 8 to be answered in phrases, and provide the frame "I would test for ___ at ___ because ___."

Extensions

Have students find the name of the watershed that supplies their own community's drinking water and identify one land use in it that a protection specialist would inspect. Groups can compare whether their local source is a reservoir, a river intake, or a well field, and discuss how the monitoring plan would differ for each.