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Worksheet Grade 6 English Language Arts

Elmcott's Groundwater Fact Sheet: A Grade 6 Paraphrase Worksheet

A grade 6 ELA worksheet using a fictional town's groundwater fact sheet to practice paraphrasing, judging copied wording, and keeping numbers and terms accurate.

Objectives

  1. Students will restate technical sentences about groundwater in their own words without changing the meaning.
  2. Students will judge whether a sample paraphrase copies too closely and explain what makes it a copy.
  3. Students will keep numbers and technical terms accurate while changing sentence structure and everyday wording.

Vocabulary

Aquifer
An aquifer is an underground layer of rock, sand, or gravel that holds water in the tiny spaces between its grains. Wells reach down into aquifers to bring water up to the surface.
Recharge
Recharge is water soaking down through the ground to refill an aquifer, the way rain refills an underground sponge. Aquifers stay healthy only if recharge keeps up with pumping.
Groundwater
Groundwater is water that has soaked into the ground and fills the spaces between soil particles and cracks in rock underground. It is a large underground source of fresh water that wells and springs draw from.

Also: paraphrase, well

Teacher overview

Students are asked to write from sources well before they can paraphrase one reliably, and a common result is a sentence with two or three words swapped out. This worksheet gives students five short sentences from a fact sheet written by the fictional Elmcott water office and asks them to restate the ideas, judge two sample paraphrases, and decide which details are never allowed to change. The scenario and its local numbers are invented, while the general facts about groundwater are drawn from published science.

Elmcott's Groundwater Fact Sheet: A Grade 6 Paraphrase Worksheet — Grade 6 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Read the five sentences below from the fact sheet of the fictional town of Elmcott. Then answer the questions. A paraphrase says the same idea in your own words. It keeps the meaning and the facts, and it changes the wording and the sentence shape.

Sentence 1. Rain and snowmelt that soak into the ground move down through soil and rock until they reach a layer of saturated rock called an aquifer.

Sentence 2. Elmcott draws all of its drinking water from two wells that reach the same aquifer under the north end of town.

Sentence 3. Recharge is the word for water that refills an aquifer, and recharge happens most in early spring, when snow melts and plants are not yet using much water.

Sentence 4. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, water spends about 9 days in the atmosphere on average, but water in deep groundwater can stay underground for centuries.

Sentence 5. In this fictional town, the water level in Elmcott's north well sat 34 feet below the surface in April and 46 feet below the surface in August.

  1. Paraphrase Sentence 1 in your own words. Keep the word "aquifer."
  2. Paraphrase Sentence 2 in your own words for a reader who has never heard of Elmcott.
  3. A student wrote this paraphrase of Sentence 3: "Recharge is the word for water that refills an aquifer, and recharge occurs most in early spring, when snow melts and plants are not yet using much water." Is this a paraphrase or is it too close to copying? Explain what the student did.
  4. Rewrite that student's paraphrase of Sentence 3 so it is truly in your own words.
  5. Sentence 3 uses the term "recharge." Should you keep that word in your paraphrase? Explain why.
  6. Sentence 5 gives two well readings. Which details must stay exactly the same in any paraphrase of that sentence? Explain why.
  7. A second student paraphrased Sentence 4 as "Water stays in the sky for about 9 months." Explain what is wrong with that paraphrase and why the error matters.
  8. Paraphrase Sentence 5 in your own words, keeping both numbers exact.
  9. Write two sentences that combine the ideas in Sentence 1 and Sentence 3 in your own words.
  10. In one or two sentences, explain what makes a paraphrase good. Name two things a paraphrase must always do.

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

Answer Key
  1. Answer: Answers will vary. A correct paraphrase says that rain and melted snow sink through soil and rock and collect in a soaked layer of rock called an aquifer. Look for new sentence structure and everyday wording, with the term "aquifer" kept.
  2. Answer: Answers will vary. A correct paraphrase says that the town gets all of its drinking water from two wells that pull from one shared aquifer on the north side. The number of wells and the single shared aquifer must both survive the rewrite.
  3. Answer: Too close to copying. The student changed only one word, replacing "happens" with "occurs," and left the rest of the sentence in the original order and wording.
  4. Answer: Answers will vary. A correct rewrite says that an aquifer refills when water soaks back into it, and that most of this refilling happens in early spring because melting snow adds water while plants are still using very little.
  5. Answer: Yes, keep it. "Recharge" is a technical term with no plain-word substitute that means the same thing, so a writer keeps the term and explains it instead of trading it for a word that changes the meaning.
  6. Answer: The two depths and the two months. Numbers are facts rather than wording, so 34 feet in April and 46 feet in August must appear unchanged in any honest paraphrase.
  7. Answer: The student changed 9 days to 9 months, which changes the fact rather than the wording. A paraphrase may reshape a sentence, yet it may never alter a measurement, because a reader relying on the paraphrase would carry away a false number.
  8. Answer: Answers will vary. A correct paraphrase reports that the water level in the town's north well was 34 feet down in April and dropped to 46 feet down by August. Both figures and both months must remain exact.
  9. Answer: Answers will vary. A correct pair of sentences explains that water from rain and melting snow soaks through soil and rock into an aquifer, and that this refilling, called recharge, is greatest in early spring. Look for the causal link between the soaking water and the refilling.
  10. Answer: Answers will vary. A complete response names at least two of these: a paraphrase keeps the original meaning, keeps every number and technical term accurate, changes the wording and sentence structure, and names the source it came from.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students a two-column organizer with the original sentence on the left and three sentence starters on the right, such as "In other words," "This means that," and "Another way to say this is." Let them paraphrase orally to a partner before writing, and reduce the required items to 1, 3, 5, 6, and 8.

Extension

Ask students to paraphrase the whole fact sheet as a four-sentence summary for a younger reader, then mark which sentence in their summary carries each original sentence. Have them explain in one sentence which original detail they chose to leave out and why the summary still stays accurate.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "paraphrase," "aquifer," "recharge," and "saturated" with a labeled cross-section drawing showing rain, soil, rock, an aquifer, and a well. Provide each original sentence split into two shorter sentences, and allow students to paraphrase the shorter versions one at a time.