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Classroom activity Grade 5 English Language Arts

Pressure Drop at the Pennyfield Pump Station: Evidence Stations

A grade 5 ELA station rotation in which pairs read five short documents about a pump station failure and copy the exact sentence that proves each claim.

Objectives

  1. Students will copy the exact sentence from a document that supports a stated claim.
  2. Students will draw an inference about a pump station failure using evidence from two different documents.
  3. Students will explain why a sentence that mentions a topic is not always evidence for a claim.

Vocabulary

Pump station
A pump station is a building full of powerful pumps that push water through pipes or lift it uphill. Pumps give water the extra push that gravity alone cannot provide.
Water tower
A water tower is a big tank raised high above town that stores drinking water. Its height is what pushes water through the pipes, keeping the pressure steady even when the power goes out.

Also: evidence, inference, quotation

Teacher overview

This is a five-station rotation for a class of twenty to thirty students working in pairs. Each station holds one short document from Pennyfield, a fictional town whose water pressure dropped overnight, and pairs move through the stations recording the exact sentence that proves each claim they are given. The rotation teaches citation by forcing a choice: several sentences at each station mention the topic, and only one of them proves the claim in the question.

Teaching note: many fifth graders believe that a pump has to run constantly for water to come out of a tap, so they search the shift log for the moment the water "stopped." In towns like Pennyfield the height of water in the tower supplies the pressure in the pipes below, and the pumps refill the tower, often overnight. Students who assume the pump pushes water straight to the tap will pick sentences about the pump breaking rather than sentences about the tower emptying, which makes this a useful misconception to surface in the debrief rather than correct in advance.

Activity Directions

  1. Before class, print the five station documents from the Student Handout and place one at each of five spots around the room. Print one question page per pair. Every document describes the fictional town of Pennyfield, so no student needs outside knowledge to answer.
  2. Open with a two-minute frame: overnight, homes on one street in Pennyfield lost water pressure, and the utility has five pieces of paper that might explain why. Tell students that their job is not to guess the cause but to find the sentences that prove it.
  3. Model station work once with the whole class. Read Station C aloud, show the claim "The problem was not inside this resident's house," and think aloud about why the sentence "Nothing is leaking in my house" proves it while the sentence about her shower does not.
  4. Assign pairs and send each pair to a different starting station. Set the timer for five minutes per station.
  5. At each station, pairs read the document once quietly, then answer only the questions on their page that name that station. They must copy sentences word for word, including the period.
  6. Rotate on the timer until every pair has visited all five stations. Twenty-five minutes of rotation is enough for five stations.
  7. Give pairs six minutes at their seats to finish questions 4, 6, 7, and 8, which ask students to explain or to name a cause rather than only to copy a sentence.
  8. End the rotation with a five-minute debrief. Ask two questions: "Which station changed your first guess about the cause?" and "Station E talks about pumps, so why is it not evidence that a pump broke?" Collect the question pages.
Pressure Drop at the Pennyfield Pump Station: Evidence Stations — Grade 5 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

The five documents below all come from Pennyfield, a fictional town that pumps well water up into a tower on a hill. Read each one at its station.

Station A: Shift log, Kiln Road pump station, Monday night. 10:40 p.m. Pump 2 shut down for a planned oil change. Pump 1 left running alone. 11:15 p.m. A storm knocked out power on Kiln Road for about forty minutes. The backup generator did not start. 11:55 p.m. Power came back on Kiln Road. Pump 1 did not restart by itself.

Station B: Tower level chart, Ridge Street water tower. The tower was full at 10 p.m. By 6 a.m. the water in the tower was about one quarter of the way up. The tower normally refills every night while the town sleeps. The pressure gauge on Larkin Street read 58 psi at 10 p.m. and 24 psi at 6 a.m.

Station C: Phone message, Tuesday 7:05 a.m. This is Dana Okonjo on Larkin Street. My shower barely trickled this morning. My neighbor two doors down said the same thing. Nothing is leaking in my house.

Station D: Work order, Tuesday 7:30 a.m. Send a crew to the Kiln Road pump station. Restart Pump 1 by hand. Test the starting battery on the backup generator. Do not dig on Larkin Street. Crews checked the street early Tuesday and found no break in the main.

Station E: Town newsletter, page 2. Pennyfield's water tower stands on the hill above Ridge Street. The weight of the water in the tower pushes water through the pipes below it. The pumps at Kiln Road do not push water to your tap. Their job is to lift water into the tower at night.

Answer these questions on your own page.

  1. Claim: the low pressure did not start inside Dana Okonjo's house. Copy the sentence from Station C that proves this claim.
  2. Claim: the pumps at Kiln Road do not push water straight to the taps in Pennyfield homes. Copy the sentence from Station E that proves this claim.
  3. Station A lists two things that happened at 11:15 p.m. Copy the sentence that names the second one.
  4. Use Station A and Station B together. In one or two sentences, explain why the tower did not refill overnight.
  5. Claim: a broken pipe under Larkin Street caused the low pressure. Copy the sentence from Station D that shows this claim is wrong.
  6. The gauge reading on Larkin Street changed between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Using Station B and Station E, explain what that change tells you about the water in the tower.
  7. A student says, "Station E proves that Pump 1 broke." Explain why Station E does not prove that claim, even though it talks about pumps.
  8. Write one sentence naming the cause of the pressure drop. Then copy one sentence from any station that supports your cause.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key

Accept only word-for-word quotations for the copying items. The town of Pennyfield and its documents are fictional, so every answer below comes from the handout itself.

  1. Answer: "Nothing is leaking in my house."
    The claim is about the inside of the home, and this sentence is the only one that rules a home leak out. Accept also "My neighbor two doors down said the same thing." when the pair explains that it shows the problem reaches past one house. A pair that copies the whole message has not selected the proving sentence.
  2. Answer: "The pumps at Kiln Road do not push water to your tap."
    Accept also "Their job is to lift water into the tower at night" if the pair explains that lifting water into the tower is a different job than pushing it to a tap.
  3. Answer: "The backup generator did not start."
    The storm knocking out power is the first event in that line; the generator failing to start is the second.
  4. Answer: Pump 1 never restarted after the power came back, so nothing lifted water into the tower, and the tower fell from full to about one quarter full by morning.
    Look for both halves: a pump that stayed off and a tower that lost water.
  5. Answer: "Crews checked the street early Tuesday and found no break in the main."
    Accept also "Do not dig on Larkin Street" only when the pair explains that the order not to dig follows from the crew finding no break.
  6. Answer: The gauge reading dropped because the water level in the tower dropped, and Station E says the weight of the water in the tower is what pushes water through the pipes. Less water in the tower means less push, so the gauge falls.
  7. Answer: Station E only explains what the pumps and the tower normally do, and it says nothing about Monday night or about Pump 1 failing. This is the item that separates "mentions the topic" from "proves the claim."
  8. Answer: The pressure dropped because Pump 1 stayed off after the power outage, so the tower did not refill overnight. Accept any station sentence that supports that cause, most often "Pump 1 did not restart by itself" from Station A or the tower level sentence from Station B.

Differentiation

Support

Give these pairs a highlighter and a version of each station document with the claim printed at the top of the page, so the search is narrowed to one document at a time. Allow them to answer items 4 and 6 orally to an adult before writing, and let them skip item 7 until the debrief, where the whole class works through it together.

Extension

Ask these pairs to write the follow-up work order the utility should issue that afternoon, naming the one repair that would prevent the same failure next time and quoting the station sentence that justifies it. Then have them mark which of the five documents would be useless to a crew that had never seen the town.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "pump," "tower," "gauge," and "pressure" with a simple sketch showing a pump at the bottom of a hill, a tower at the top, and an arrow to a house. Pair each student with a partner who reads aloud, and accept the sentence number plus the first four words as a copied quotation for items 1, 2, 3, and 5.

Extensions

Set the same five documents in front of students a second time with one sentence removed from Station A, and ask which questions can no longer be answered from evidence. Students then write a short note to the utility explaining which record was the most useful and why a shift log that skips the reason for a shutdown is harder to read a week later.