Reading passage Grade 4 English Language Arts
A Ride-Along with the Ripplemead Valve Crew: A Grade 4 Passage
A grade 4 passage told by a student who spends a Saturday with a fictional town's valve crew, listening for a hidden leak and learning what the crew's tools do.
Objectives
- Students will identify the tasks a valve crew performs during one work shift.
- Students will explain how the crew locates a leak using details from the passage.
- Students will infer why the crew marks a street before any digging begins.
Vocabulary
- Valve
- A valve is a device in a pipe that operators can open or close to control where water flows. Valves let crews shut off one street for repairs without turning off the whole town.
Also: hydrant, leak, crew, locate
Teacher overview
Ripplemead is a fictional town, and this passage follows a fourth grader named Noor through one Saturday with her aunt's valve crew. Valve crew work is hard for students to picture because most of it happens under the street, so the passage stays on the surface with the tools and the sounds. It works well before a career-day activity or alongside any unit on jobs in a community. A misconception the passage corrects is that a leak is found by looking for water, when the crew in this passage pinpoints one by listening at hydrants after a neighbor reports a lawn that stays wet.
Passage
My aunt Nadine works for the Ripplemead Water Department. She is on the valve crew. On the first Saturday in October, she took me to work with her.
We started at a truck yard by the river. Aunt Nadine handed me a hard hat and a bright green vest. The vest was too big. She said the color matters more than the fit, because drivers need to see us from far away.
Our first stop was a corner on Oldgate Street. A round metal lid sat in the pavement. Aunt Nadine popped it open with a hook. Under it was a valve. A valve is a gate inside a water pipe. When workers close a valve, water stops flowing down that stretch of pipe. When they open it, the water flows again.
Aunt Nadine fit a long metal key down through the hole. She turned it, slowly, many times. Then she turned it back the same number of times. I asked why she bothered, since nothing had broken.
She said a valve that never moves can rust shut. Then, on the night a pipe bursts, the crew cannot close it. So the crew visits every valve in town and turns it, one at a time, year after year. She called it exercising the valves. Ripplemead has thousands of them.
Our second stop was quieter. A man on Alcott Street had told the department his lawn stayed wet even in dry weather. Aunt Nadine took out a listening stick. One end has a metal point. The other end fits against your ear.
She pressed the point onto the top of a fire hydrant and stood very still. Then she moved down the block and pressed it onto the next one. She let me listen too. At the first hydrant, I heard almost nothing. At the second, I heard a soft hiss, like air leaving a balloon far away.
That hiss was water escaping from a crack in the pipe under the street. Aunt Nadine sprayed a short blue line on the pavement and wrote a date beside it. She said a repair crew would come Monday with a backhoe. Before anyone digs, other workers come out and mark the gas and power lines in different colors, so nobody cuts the wrong thing.
On the ride back, I asked how she learned all of it. She said she started right after high school, riding along the way I was, and that she still takes classes for her license. She said the sounds took the longest to learn.
Questions
- Where does Aunt Nadine work, and what crew is she on?
- What is a valve, according to the passage?
- Why does the crew turn valves that are not broken?
- What tool did Aunt Nadine use to look for the leak, and how does a person use it?
- What did Noor hear at the second hydrant, and what was making that sound?
- Why do other workers mark the gas and power lines before the repair crew digs?
- Aunt Nadine says the sounds took the longest to learn. Use details from the passage to explain why that part of the job would be hard.
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: She works for the Ripplemead Water Department, on the valve crew. The first paragraph states both.
- Answer: A gate inside a water pipe. The passage explains that closing a valve stops water in that stretch of pipe and opening it lets water flow again.
- Answer: Because a valve that never moves can rust shut, and then the crew could not close it during an emergency. The passage says the crew exercises every valve in town.
- Answer: A listening stick. One end has a metal point that presses onto a hydrant, and the other end fits against the listener's ear.
- Answer: A soft hiss, which was water escaping from a crack in the pipe under the street. The passage states this right after she lets Noor listen.
- Answer: So that nobody digging cuts a gas or power line by mistake. Accept any answer naming the danger of hitting the wrong buried line.
- Answer: Answers will vary but should refer to the passage. The hiss was faint and far away, and the first hydrant sounded like almost nothing, so a worker has to tell tiny differences apart while standing on a street.
Differentiation
Support
Provide a two-column chart with the headings Stop 1 and Stop 2 and let students list what happened at each before answering the questions. Allow question 7 to be answered orally, and give students the paragraph number where each of the first five answers can be found.
Extension
Ask students to write the department's short work order for Monday's repair crew, using only what the passage supplies: the street, what the crew heard, what the blue mark means, and what has to happen before digging. The work order needs at least four sentences.
ELL supports
Pre-teach valve, hydrant, and crew with photographs, and demonstrate a listening stick by having students press an ear to a desk while a partner scratches the far end. Allow questions 1 through 5 to be answered with short phrases, and provide a sentence frame for question 6.