Graphic organizer Grade 5 English Language Arts
Word Maps for the Lowmarsh Creek Water Report
A grade 5 word-map organizer for runoff, sediment, and discharge, built from a short creek report, with a completed exemplar including confusable-word pairs.
Objectives
- Students will copy the sentence in a report that shows what a term means.
- Students will restate a technical term in their own words and in a drawing.
- Students will distinguish a term from a second term readers often confuse with it.
Vocabulary
Key words: runoff, sediment, discharge, permit, sample
Teacher overview
This organizer is a five-column word map repeated for three terms. Students find the sentence in a short creek report that shows what each term means, restate the meaning, sketch it, and then name a second word readers often confuse it with. The fifth column is what makes this a word map rather than a glossary, because a student who can tell a term apart from the word most often confused with it has a firmer hold on what it means.
Teaching note: two confusions are worth planning for. Students routinely treat brown water as proof of chemical pollution, when the report describes soil rather than a chemical, and they treat runoff and discharge as the same event because both put water into the creek. The report separates them by where the water comes from, a pipe someone controls in one case and the open ground in the other. Ask students to point at that difference in the text before they fill the last column.
Organizer
Read the report. Then fill in one word map for each of the three terms in the table.
Lowmarsh Creek Water Report, May
Lowmarsh Creek runs past three farms and one town park. Crews took samples in May after two days of rain. Runoff carried soil off a bare field and into the water. Runoff is rain that flows over the ground instead of soaking in. The creek looked brown for two days. The brown color came from sediment, which is the small bits of soil and sand that water carries and then drops. Sediment settled on the gravel where fish lay their eggs. The town also has a pipe at the park that sends treated water back into the creek. That flow is called a discharge. A discharge is water released from a pipe into a stream or a lake. The May discharge met the town's permit. Crews will take samples again in June.
| Word | The sentence from the report that shows what it means | What it means in my own words | A picture I would draw | A word people mix it up with, and how it is different |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| runoff | ||||
| sediment | ||||
| discharge |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Completed Exemplar
| Word | The sentence from the report that shows what it means | What it means in my own words | A picture I would draw | A word people mix it up with, and how it is different |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| runoff | "Runoff is rain that flows over the ground instead of soaking in." | Rain that slides across the ground into a creek instead of sinking into the soil. | An arrow of water running off a bare brown field and into a creek. | Rain. Rain is the water falling from the sky, and runoff is what that water does after it lands and does not soak in. |
| sediment | "The brown color came from sediment, which is the small bits of soil and sand that water carries and then drops." | Small bits of soil and sand that water picks up and later drops. | Brown creek water with grains settling down onto gray gravel. | Chemical pollution. Sediment is soil rather than a chemical, and it harms fish by covering the gravel where they lay eggs. |
| discharge | "A discharge is water released from a pipe into a stream or a lake." | Water let out of a pipe into a creek or a lake. | A pipe at the creek bank with water flowing out of it. | Runoff. A discharge leaves one pipe that someone controls, while runoff comes off the open ground in many places at once. |
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the report with the three terms already underlined and the "sentence from the report" column filled in, so their work begins at the own-words column. Provide two picture choices per row and let students circle the better one instead of drawing.
Extension
Ask these students to build a fourth word map for "permit," a term the report uses without defining, and to write the sentence the report would need to add so a reader could work the meaning out from the page. Then have them explain why a writer might assume a reader already knows that word.
ELL supports
Provide a picture card for each of the three terms before reading, and read the report aloud once while students track the underlined words. Allow the own-words column to be completed in a student's first language and then in English, and accept a labeled sketch in place of the last column for the first term.
Extensions
Have students use their completed maps to write a two-sentence caption for a photograph of the brown creek, one sentence naming what a viewer sees and one naming what the report says caused it. Comparing captions across the class shows how often a writer reaches for the word "pollution" when a more exact word is available on the page.