Classroom activity Grade 10 English Language Arts
Rebuilding the Jarnwick Water Reuse Explainer
A grade 10 jigsaw in which groups reorder eight scrambled paragraphs of a fictional water reuse explainer using cohesion cues, then defend the order they chose.
Objectives
- Students will reorder a scrambled explanatory text using transition and reference cues.
- Students will name the words that fix a paragraph's position in a sequence.
- Students will explain the job the closing paragraph does in an explanatory text.
Vocabulary
Key words: cohesion, transition, reference word, sequence, antecedent, controlling idea
Teacher overview
Groups of three receive the eight paragraphs of one fictional explainer, cut apart and shuffled, and must rebuild the article using only the words inside it. Each round ends with a group defending one placement out loud by naming the exact word that fixed it, which is what keeps the task from becoming a guess about subject matter. Two misconceptions show up immediately. Students order the paragraphs by what sounds basic rather than by what the sentences point to, so they put the description of membranes first because filters seem like a beginning. Students also treat transitions as decoration added at the end of drafting, rather than as the load-bearing links that tell a reader which paragraph they are standing in.
Activity Directions
- Before class, print the student handout for each student and cut one set of eight paragraph strips per group. The city, the plant, and the explainer are fictional.
- Spend three minutes introducing the task rather than the topic. Tell students that they are not being asked what they know about water reuse, and that every clue they need is inside the eight paragraphs.
- Give each group a shuffled set of strips face down. Groups turn them over and read all eight before moving any of them. Hold this reading period to four minutes with a timer.
- Run round one for ten minutes. Groups arrange the strips in the order they believe is correct and write, on their large sheet, the letter of each paragraph with the word or phrase that fixed its position beside it. A placement with no cue written beside it does not count as placed.
- Call a two-minute freeze. Each group sends one member to look at the sheet of the group to their right and to write a single question on it about any placement whose cue looks weak.
- Run round two for six minutes. Groups answer the question left on their sheet and adjust any placement they can no longer defend. Groups that change nothing must write one sentence saying why the challenged placement holds.
- Take the order up as a class in four minutes. Do not reveal the full sequence at once. Ask which paragraph must be first, then which must be last, then work inward, requiring a cue each time.
- Close with the debrief. Students answer questions 1 through 7 on the handout individually. Take up question 4 as a class, because pronoun reference is where the disputed placements almost always turn out to have been decided.
Student Handout
The city of Jarnwick, its plants, and the explainer below are fictional, written for this activity. The eight paragraphs are printed in alphabetical order, which is not the order they belong in.
Paragraph A. The third barrier uses ultraviolet light together with an added oxidant. Light at this intensity breaks apart the small molecules that slipped through the previous stage, including compounds that a membrane cannot catch because they are not much larger than a water molecule.
Paragraph B. That effluent met the standards written for a river and not the standards written for a tap. The advanced treatment plant that opened on Draybank Road begins where the older process stopped, and it treats the same water a second time for a different purpose.
Paragraph C. The second barrier is reverse osmosis. Pumps push the water against a membrane so fine that dissolved salts and most dissolved chemicals stay behind, and what passes through is nearly pure water that has to have minerals added back before anyone drinks it.
Paragraph D. The reason for the detour is time. Water that spends months moving through sand and gravel before it reaches a city well gives operators a long window in which a monitoring result can be acted on, which is the part of the system that residents at the public meetings asked about most often.
Paragraph E. The first of these steps is not new. Jarnwick has run a water reclamation plant for decades, settling and treating what leaves the city's drains and sending the result to the river under a discharge permit.
Paragraph F. Even after the third barrier, the water does not travel to a tap. It is spread in shallow recharge basins east of town, where it soaks down through sand and gravel into the aquifer that the city's wells already draw from.
Paragraph G. Jarnwick's newest source of drinking water is water the city has already used once. The idea sounds strange until you follow what happens between the two uses, which is a sequence of steps, each of which removes something the step before it left behind.
Paragraph H. Inside the advanced plant the water meets three barriers in order. The first is a set of fine membranes that strain out particles and bacteria too large to pass through openings measured in fractions of a micron.
Debrief questions
- Write the letters of the eight paragraphs in the order they belong.
- Name the words in the opening paragraph that show it is an opening rather than a middle paragraph.
- Paragraph B begins with the words "That effluent." Name the paragraph that must come immediately before it.
- Explain what the word "That" in Paragraph B points back to.
- Three paragraphs are held in place because each introduces one of the advanced plant's barriers by its number. Write those three phrases in the order they appear in the finished article.
- Paragraph F begins with "Even after the third barrier." Explain why F cannot be placed before Paragraph A.
- Name the job the final paragraph does that none of the other seven does.
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: G, E, B, H, C, A, F, D. Groups that place H, C, and A in that internal order but move the block earlier should be asked to reread the first sentence of B.
- Answer: "Jarnwick's newest source of drinking water is water the city has already used once," together with "which is a sequence of steps, each of which removes something the step before it left behind." The first states the whole subject without depending on any earlier sentence, and the second announces the structure the rest of the article follows.
- Answer: Paragraph E. It is the only paragraph that describes an effluent, naming the reclamation plant that sends treated water to the river under a discharge permit.
- Answer: It points back to the treated water that Paragraph E says the reclamation plant sends to the river. "That" requires a specific thing already named, so any placement that puts B before E leaves the word pointing at nothing.
- Answer: "The first is a set of fine membranes," "The second barrier is reverse osmosis," and "The third barrier uses ultraviolet light." Accept the shortened forms first, second barrier, and third barrier.
- Answer: F opens by referring to the third barrier as something the reader has already met, and Paragraph A is the paragraph that introduces it. Placing F before A would have the article treat as known a stage it has not yet described.
- Answer: It states why the design matters rather than what the design is, and it is the only paragraph that mentions the people affected. Accept answers naming either the shift from description to significance or the reference to residents at the public meetings.
Differentiation
Support
Give these students six strips rather than eight, with Paragraph G already taped in place as the opening and Paragraph D as the closing, so the work is the middle sequence. Highlight the first four words of every strip, and provide a short list of the cue words to look for, including that, the first, the second, the third, and even after.
Extension
Ask these students to write a ninth paragraph that could be inserted between F and D without breaking either link, explaining what the city monitors in the recharge basins. The paragraph must open with a reference word that points back to F and must end in a way that still allows D's first sentence to follow.
ELL supports
Pre-teach effluent, barrier, membrane, recharge basin, and aquifer with a labeled sketch showing drains, the reclamation plant, the advanced plant, the basins, and a city well. Provide a bilingual glossary of the cue words, and allow groups to arrange the strips and name their cues orally before recording them in writing. Question 4 may be answered by drawing an arrow from the word to its antecedent on the printed handout.
Extensions
Have students cut apart a page of their own most recent explanatory essay and give it to a partner to reorder. Ask the writer to record which paragraphs the partner could place immediately and which ones floated, then revise the floating paragraphs by adding the reference or sequence words that were missing.