Graphic organizer Grade 4 English Language Arts
The Clogged Storm Drain on Pinsley Street: A Cause Chain
A grade 4 cause-and-effect chain organizer built from a short town notice about a leaf-clogged storm drain, with a completed exemplar for checking work.
Objectives
- Students will order five links of a cause-and-effect chain from a short notice.
- Students will mark which link the notice states and which link they inferred.
- Students will write one closing sentence that sums up the chain.
Vocabulary
- Storm drain
- A storm drain is the grate at the edge of a street that swallows rainwater and sends it through pipes to the nearest creek or river. That water is usually not treated, so only rain belongs down the drain.
Also: cause, effect, grate, yard waste
Teacher overview
This organizer is a five-link cause-and-effect chain, read top to bottom, with each link caused by the one above it. The source is a short notice from a fictional town, and one link in the middle is never stated in the notice, so students have to supply it and then mark it as their own inference. Fourth graders often read a chain like this as a list of separate problems rather than as one event pushing the next, which is why the boxes carry arrows between them and each box asks what the box above it caused. The last two rows move students from the chain to a single explanatory sentence.
Organizer
Read the notice. Then fill in the chain from the top down.
Notice taped to the light pole on Pinsley Street, in the town of Nordham:
Pinsley Street floods at Bell Corner every time it rains hard. The drain grate there sits under two big maple trees. Last October, crews raked eleven bags of leaves off that grate. Water that cannot enter the grate runs down the sidewalk. It ends at the front door of the corner store. From September through November, the town will rake this grate every Friday. Please do not sweep yard waste into the street.
Chain organizer
| Link | What belongs in this box | Your answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The first cause: what lands on the grate, and where it comes from | |
| ↓ 2 | What the pile does to the grate | |
| ↓ 3 | Where the rain water goes instead | |
| ↓ 4 | What the water reaches at the end of the sidewalk | |
| ↓ 5 | What the town decided to do about it |
After the chain
| Question | Your answer |
|---|---|
| Which link does the notice state in its own words? Name one. | |
| Which link did you have to figure out yourself? | |
| One thing a family on Pinsley Street can do to help | |
| Closing sentence: sum up the whole chain in one sentence, without adding anything new |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Completed Exemplar
Chain organizer
| Link | What belongs in this box | Your answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The first cause: what lands on the grate, and where it comes from | Leaves fall from the two big maple trees and land on the drain grate at Bell Corner. |
| ↓ 2 | What the pile does to the grate | The pile of leaves covers the openings, so rain water cannot get down into the drain. |
| ↓ 3 | Where the rain water goes instead | The water runs along the street and down the sidewalk. |
| ↓ 4 | What the water reaches at the end of the sidewalk | It reaches the front door of the corner store. |
| ↓ 5 | What the town decided to do about it | The town will rake the grate every Friday from September through November. |
After the chain
| Question | Your answer |
|---|---|
| Which link does the notice state in its own words? Name one. | Link 3. The notice says water that cannot enter the grate runs down the sidewalk. Link 4 and link 5 are stated as well. |
| Which link did you have to figure out yourself? | Link 2. The notice never says the leaves block the openings, only that crews raked bags of leaves off the grate. |
| One thing a family on Pinsley Street can do to help | Keep raked leaves and grass out of the street, as the last line of the notice asks. |
| Closing sentence: sum up the whole chain in one sentence, without adding anything new | Leaves from the maple trees block the Bell Corner grate, so rain water runs down the sidewalk to the store door until a crew clears the grate. |
Differentiation
Support
Fill in link 1 and link 5 before copying, so students work only on the middle of the chain. Provide four sentence strips cut from the notice and let students place the strips in the boxes before writing anything in their own words.
Extension
Ask these students to add a sixth box for what happens after the Friday raking stops in December, and to mark whether their sixth box is stated by the notice or inferred. Then have them write a second closing sentence aimed at the store owner rather than at the town.
ELL supports
Pre-teach grate, sidewalk, rake, and yard waste with photographs or quick sketches, and act out water meeting a covered grate using a colander and a handful of paper scraps. Accept short phrases rather than full sentences in links 1 through 5, and require a full sentence only in the closing row.
Extensions
Walk the class to the nearest storm drain on school grounds and build a second chain for it, using what students can actually see above the grate. Compare the two chains and mark the links that are the same at both drains and the links that differ because of the trees or the slope.