Graphic organizer Grade 4 English Language Arts
Three Jobs at the Owlsbury Water District: Notes Organizer
A grade 4 three-column comparison organizer for research notes on three water district jobs, built from short postings and finished with a question for each role.
Objectives
- Students will record details about three jobs from short postings without adding assumptions.
- Students will compare three roles across the same four categories.
- Students will write one research question for each role that the postings do not answer.
Vocabulary
Key words: district, posting, license, sample, meter
Teacher overview
This organizer is a three-column comparison frame, one column per job, with the same four questions asked of each and a fifth row for what a student still wants to know. The three postings come from a fictional water district, and each names a different path into the work, so the finished frame shows three real routes rather than one. Fourth graders often assume every job at a water utility is the same job with a different title, and the middle rows are built to break that assumption by asking what each person actually touches during a day. The final row turns the organizer into a research plan rather than a finished report.
Organizer
Read the three postings. Fill in one column for each job. Every note in rows 1 through 4 must come from the posting.
Job board, Owlsbury Water District (fictional)
| Posting | What it says |
|---|---|
| Distribution operator | Ms. Adeyemi keeps water moving through the pipes under Owlsbury. She reads pressure gauges around town, opens and closes valves, and flushes hydrants so old water does not sit in a dead end. When a main breaks, she decides which valves to close first. She finished high school, trained on the job for two years, and passed a state exam for her license. Operator licenses come in classes, and she is studying for the next one. |
| Water quality lab analyst | Mr. Crandle tests water samples all day in the district lab. Samples arrive from the plant, from the pipes, and from homes that call with a complaint. He measures how cloudy a sample is, checks it for germs, and writes each result in a record the state can ask to see. He earned a two-year college degree in science and holds a state certificate for the tests he runs. |
| Meter technician | Mr. Lanthorn installs and repairs the meters that count how much water each home uses. He digs out meter boxes, replaces cracked lids, and swaps meters that have stopped counting. When a family says their bill looks wrong, he checks the meter first. He finished high school and learned the work from a senior technician over one year. |
Comparison frame
| Question | Distribution operator | Lab analyst | Meter technician |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. What does this person do on a normal day? | |||
| 2. What does this person touch, carry, or read? | |||
| 3. Where does the work happen? | |||
| 4. How did this person get ready for the job? | |||
| 5. One question I still have |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Completed Exemplar
| Question | Distribution operator | Lab analyst | Meter technician |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. What does this person do on a normal day? | Reads pressure gauges, opens and closes valves, and flushes hydrants. | Tests samples from the plant, the pipes, and homes that called. | Installs meters, repairs them, and replaces cracked meter box lids. |
| 2. What does this person touch, carry, or read? | Gauges, valves, and hydrants. | Sample bottles, test equipment, and the record book. | Meters, box lids, digging tools. |
| 3. Where does the work happen? | Out in the streets of Owlsbury, at valves and hydrants. | Inside the district lab. | At meter boxes outside homes. |
| 4. How did this person get ready for the job? | High school, two years of training on the job, and a state exam for a license she is still adding to. | A two-year college degree in science and a state certificate for the tests he runs. | High school, then one year learning from a senior technician. |
| 5. One question I still have | Who decides which valve she closes first when two mains break at once? | What does he do when a test result looks wrong? | How does he tell a stopped meter from a slow one? |
Row 4 shows three different starting points, and all three lead to steady work at the same district. The postings never rank them.
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the frame with row 3 already filled in, since location is the easiest row to find in each posting, and let them use it as a model for row 2. Allow one-word or short-phrase notes in rows 1 through 4, and let row 5 be answered for only one of the three jobs.
Extension
Ask these students to add a fourth column for a job the postings do not include, such as the person who answers the phone when a family calls about a bill, and to fill rows 1 through 4 with what the three postings let them reasonably conclude. Every entry must be marked as either stated or inferred.
ELL supports
Pre-teach valve, hydrant, sample, and meter with photographs, and point out that reading a gauge means looking at a number rather than reading words. Provide the four row questions on a separate strip so students can point to the row they are working on while a partner reads the posting aloud.
Extensions
Have the class use row 5 to build one shared list of questions, then choose three to send to a local water utility or to look up in a career source in the school library. Add the answers to the frame as a sixth row so the organizer records where each new fact came from.