Lesson plan Grade 5 English Language Arts

Cause and Effect at Duskwater Reservoir

A grade 5 ELA lesson on cause-and-effect text structure, using a short article about a fictional town's reservoir dropping through two dry winters and refilling.

Grade: Grade 5
Subject: English Language Arts
Material: Lesson plan
Time: 45 min
Prep: Low prep
Materials: Printed student handout, Colored pencils or highlighters

Standards

RI.5.1 Common Core ELA

Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

How this material aligns: Handout questions 2 and 4 require students to quote the article accurately when naming the cause of the reservoir's drop and the evidence for its refill.

All materials for RI.5.1 →

W.5.2 Common Core ELA

Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.

How this material aligns: Students write one explanatory paragraph on why the reservoir dropped and refilled, using linking words from the posted list and a concluding sentence. The writing is a single paragraph, so it covers the linking and closing work of W.5.2 rather than the full standard.

All materials for W.5.2 →

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This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely, without attribution. Updated 2026-07-23.

Objectives

Students will identify signal words that mark a cause-and-effect relationship in an informational text.
Students will quote the sentence that states a cause and explain the effect it produced.
Students will write a cause-and-effect paragraph using linking words and a concluding sentence.

Vocabulary

Watershed: A watershed is all the land where rain that falls will drain to the same stream, river, or lake. Everyone lives in a watershed, no matter how far from the water they live.
Reservoir: A human-made lake, usually created by a dam, that stores water for later. Reservoirs supply cities and farms and help control floods.
Snowpack: The snow that piles up in the mountains over the winter. As it melts in spring and summer, it acts like a giant water tank feeding rivers and reservoirs.

Also: cause, effect

Teacher overview

A reservoir rises and falls for reasons that a fifth grader can trace in a text if the writing makes the links visible. This lesson uses a short article about a fictional town whose reservoir fell through two dry winters and refilled after a wet spring, and it treats the article as a model of cause-and-effect structure rather than as a science reading. Students mark the signal words, match causes to effects, and then write a paragraph of their own that keeps the chain in order. A common error at this grade is treating any two events that appear near each other in a text as a cause and an effect, so the modeling step contrasts a real causal link with a pair of events that merely happened in the same season.

Procedure

Hook (5 min): Write two sentences on the board: "The creek rose in April." and "The reservoir filled in May." Ask whether the first caused the second, and how a reader could tell. Take answers without settling the question yet.

Teaching the signal words (8 min): Post a list of cause-and-effect signal words and phrases: because, so, as a result, since, which caused, this led to. Explain that a writer uses these to show a reader that one event produced another, and that events listed without such a link may simply have happened at the same time. Return to the board sentences and show that neither sentence carries a signal word, so a reader cannot tell from those two sentences alone whether the rising creek filled the reservoir or the two events simply followed one another on the calendar.

Reading and marking (12 min): Distribute the handout. Read the article aloud once. Students reread it and circle every signal word from the posted list, then draw an arrow in the margin from each cause to the effect it produced. Circulate and check that arrows point from cause to effect rather than in reading order.

Handout questions (12 min): Students answer the five numbered questions independently. Questions 2 and 4 require an exact quoted sentence, and question 5 sets up the paragraph they will write.

Writing (6 min): Students write one paragraph explaining why the Duskwater Reservoir dropped and then refilled. Require at least three sentences that use a signal word from the posted list and one concluding sentence.

Closure and formative check (2 min): Students hand in the paragraph with their strongest cause-and-effect sentence underlined. Scan the underlined sentences as students leave. If more than a third of the class underlined a sentence with no signal word or no real causal link, reteach the distinction with two new sentence pairs the next day.

Cause and Effect at Duskwater Reservoir — Grade 5 English Language Arts

Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Article: the year Duskwater Reservoir came back

The town of Kestrelton drinks from Duskwater Reservoir. The reservoir sits behind a small dam on Marrowbone Creek, and the creek is fed by rain and melting snow from the ridges above the valley. All of the land that drains into the creek is called its watershed. In this fictional valley, the watershed is mostly forest, with a few pastures near the town.

Two winters in a row brought little snow to the ridges. Because the snowpack was thin, the creek carried less water through the spring melt, and the reservoir behind the dam kept dropping. By late summer of the second dry year, the water had fallen far enough that a gravel bar appeared in the middle of the reservoir. Boat owners complained about the shallow ramp, and the town asked families to stop watering lawns in the afternoon.

The town also fixed two leaking mains that summer, since every gallon that leaked out of a pipe had already been taken from the reservoir. Crews replaced a section of pipe on Center Street in August.

The next winter was different. Storm after storm crossed the ridges, and the snowpack grew deep. As a result, Marrowbone Creek ran high and muddy through April, and the reservoir rose week after week. By the middle of May the gravel bar was under water again, and the town lifted its afternoon watering rule.

Questions

List the signal words you circled in the article. Write at least three.
Copy the exact sentence that tells why the creek carried less water in the spring melt. Then name the effect that sentence describes.
The article says a gravel bar appeared in the middle of the reservoir. Was that gravel bar a cause or an effect? Explain your thinking.
Copy the exact sentence that gives the strongest evidence that the reservoir refilled. Explain what that sentence shows a reader.
The article mentions that crews replaced a section of pipe on Center Street in August. Did the dry winters cause that repair, or did the two events simply happen in the same year? Use the article to support your answer.

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: The signal words in the article are because, since, and as a result. Several phrases on the posted list, including "so," "which caused," and "this led to," do not appear in the article, so a student who lists one of them has copied the posted list rather than marked the text and should be sent back to find the words in the article itself.
Answer: "Because the snowpack was thin, the creek carried less water through the spring melt, and the reservoir behind the dam kept dropping." The effect is that the creek carried less water and the reservoir dropped.
Answer: An effect. The gravel bar appeared because the water level fell, so the falling water level is the cause and the visible gravel bar is the result.
Answer: "By the middle of May the gravel bar was under water again, and the town lifted its afternoon watering rule." The sentence shows the reservoir rose high enough to cover the bar that had appeared during the dry years, which is direct evidence of a refill.
Answer: The article connects the leak repairs to the low reservoir. It says the town fixed the leaking mains "since every gallon that leaked out of a pipe had already been taken from the reservoir," so the low reservoir was a reason for that work, and the Center Street job is the pipe replacement that sentence leads into. Also give full credit to a student who answers that the article does not link them directly, as long as the student points out that the Center Street sentence carries no signal word and the article never says that pipe was one of the two leaks. Noticing that gap is the distinction this lesson teaches.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the article with the signal words already boxed and a two-column organizer labeled Cause and Effect with the first row filled in. For the writing step, provide the topic sentence so their work is spent on the three linked sentences.

Extension

Ask students to rewrite the third paragraph of the article so that the causal link between the leaking mains and the low reservoir is removed, then explain in two sentences how the change affects what a reader can conclude.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "snowpack," "watershed," "reservoir," and "gravel bar" with a simple drawing of a valley, a creek, and a dam. Provide the signal words on a desk card with a translated gloss, and give a frame for the paragraph: "The reservoir dropped because ___. As a result, ___."

Extensions

Students look for cause-and-effect signal words in a second short informational text of the teacher's choosing and compare how clearly each writer marks the links, reporting their finding in three sentences.