Worksheet Grade 5 English Language Arts
Reading a Job Posting at the Alderport Water Plant
A grade 5 ELA worksheet pairing a fictional plant operator job posting with real Bureau of Labor Statistics career notes, with ten quote-and-explain items.
Objectives
- Students will locate and copy the sentence in a job posting that answers a specific question.
- Students will use a set of career notes to explain what a pay range does and does not show.
- Students will describe more than one path into water plant work.
Vocabulary
Key words: posting, license, operator, median, shift
Teacher overview
The worksheet pairs two kinds of text about the same job. The first is a posting from Alderport, a fictional town hiring an entry-level operator for its water plant, and the second is a short set of career notes drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for operators nationwide. Students answer each question from a named text, which keeps the local offer and the national picture separate.
Teaching note: students often read a single pay figure as the pay for everyone in a field, so they answer item 9 by repeating the median. The notes give a low-end figure and a high-end figure alongside the median precisely so a reader can see the spread. Ask the class what a number in the middle of a list can and cannot tell you before students write item 9, and expect to return to that question when the same figure appears in social studies.
Student Worksheet
Alderport is a fictional town. The career notes below the posting use Bureau of Labor Statistics figures and describe operators across the whole country.
Alderport Water Department Job Posting
Job title. Water treatment plant operator, Class I. This is an entry-level job.
Where. The Alderport water treatment plant on Mill Road.
Hours. Four ten-hour days each week. One of those days is a weekend day each month. The plant runs every hour of the year.
What you would do. Read the gauges and meters at the start of each shift. Take water samples and run tests on them. Adjust how much treatment chemical the plant feeds. Write down what you did in the shift log. Call the supervisor when a reading moves outside its normal range.
What you need on your first day. A high school diploma. A driver's license. The strength to climb stairs and lift a forty-pound bag.
What you need within two years. A state Class I operator license. You earn the license by passing a state exam. The town pays the exam fee for you.
Starting pay. $24.10 an hour, with a raise once you pass the state exam.
Career notes based on Bureau of Labor Statistics figures
Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators earned a median of $60,020 a year in May 2025. The lowest-paid tenth earned less than $39,110. The highest tenth earned more than $91,060. About 10,000 openings for water and wastewater operators are expected each year, on average, from 2025 to 2035, even though the total number of operator jobs is expected to shrink by 6 percent. All of those openings come from replacing workers who move to other kinds of jobs or stop working, for example to retire. The country employed about 131,000 water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators in 2025. Most operators start with a high school diploma, learn on the job, and earn a state license by passing an exam. Licenses come in classes, and a higher class lets an operator work at a larger plant. Water departments also hire people who finish a two-year certificate, engineers who finish a four-year degree, and scientists who study water for even longer. All of those paths can lead to work in a water department.
- Copy the job title from the posting.
- The posting lists what you must have on your first day. Copy the sentence that names the school requirement.
- What must a new operator have within two years? Copy the sentence from the posting.
- How does a person earn that license? Copy the sentence that tells you.
- Copy one sentence from the posting that shows the plant needs someone on duty at night.
- What did operators in the middle of the range earn in May 2025? Copy the sentence from the career notes.
- The notes say about 10,000 openings are expected each year. Copy the sentence that tells why those openings happen.
- Claim: a person can start this job without a college degree. Copy one sentence from the posting or the notes that supports this claim.
- A student says, "The notes prove that every operator earns the same pay." Explain why the notes do not support that claim.
- A friend says water plant jobs are only for people who did not go to college. Use the career notes to explain why that is not accurate.
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: "Water treatment plant operator, Class I."
Accept also the title with the following sentence about it being entry level. - Answer: "A high school diploma."
Accept only this line. The state license belongs to the two-year requirement, not the first day. - Answer: "A state Class I operator license."
Accept the sentence under the heading about the first two years. - Answer: "You earn the license by passing a state exam."
Accept also the sentence about the town paying the exam fee only when the student explains that it tells who pays rather than how the license is earned. - Answer: "The plant runs every hour of the year."
Accept also "Read the gauges and meters at the start of each shift." when the student explains that more than one shift a day means someone works at night. - Answer: "Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators earned a median of $60,020 a year in May 2025." The word "median" is what marks it as the middle of the range.
- Answer: "All of those openings come from replacing workers who move to other kinds of jobs or stop working, for example to retire." Accept this sentence only, since it is the one that gives the reason.
- Answer: "Most operators start with a high school diploma, learn on the job, and earn a state license by passing an exam." Accept also the first-day requirement of a high school diploma from the posting.
- Answer: The notes give a low figure of about $39,110 and a high figure of more than $91,060 alongside the median, so they show a range rather than one shared amount. A student who only repeats the median has not used the two figures on either side of it.
- Answer: The notes list several paths into water work, including starting with a high school diploma and a license, finishing a two-year certificate, finishing a four-year engineering degree, and studying water science longer, and they say all of those paths can lead to work in a water department. Accept any answer naming at least two paths, one of which involves college.
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the posting and the notes on separate half-sheets, and label each question with the sheet it draws on. Model item 1 aloud, then let students underline the answer before copying it. Provide the sentence frame "The notes say ___, and they also say ___" for item 9.
Extension
Ask these students to write the three questions they would ask at an interview for this job, each one aimed at information the posting leaves out, and to mark which question the career notes already answer. Then have them write a short paragraph on what the posting would need to add for a reader deciding between this job and a two-year certificate program.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "posting," "shift," "license," "exam," and "median" with a picture card for each, and show a simple number line with three marks to explain what a middle figure means. Allow students to highlight the answer in the text and read it aloud instead of copying it for items 1 through 5, and accept phrases in items 9 and 10.
Extensions
Have students write a second posting for the same plant, this time for a summer helper who cleans, paints, and carries samples, and ask them to decide which lines from the operator posting still belong and which do not. Comparing the two postings shows students that a job description is a set of choices a writer makes about what a reader needs to know first.