Reading passage Grade 6 English Language Arts
The Ravensbrook Watershed: A Grade 6 Reading Passage
A grade 6 informational passage that follows a student tracing her town's tap water back through a creek and reservoir to its watershed.
Objectives
- Students will explain in their own words what a watershed is using details from the passage.
- Students will cite text evidence to show how activity on the land can affect a town's drinking water.
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.
Also: runoff, buffer, ridge
Teacher overview
This passage follows a fictional student named Nadia as she learns what a watershed is on a class field trip. It introduces the idea that all the land draining to one body of water is connected to the water people drink. Teachers can use it to build the vocabulary of watersheds and to practice citing text evidence, since several questions ask students to point to the exact detail that supports an answer.
Passage
Nadia had crossed the bridge over Ravensbrook Creek a hundred times. She had never once thought about where the water came from or where it went. Then her class took a field trip, and her whole town started to look different.
Her teacher, Mr. Salazar, held up a map of the town of Ravensbrook. He traced a line along the top of the hills with his finger. "Everything inside this line is one watershed," he said. A watershed is all the land where rain drains to the same place. In Ravensbrook, that place is Ravensbrook Reservoir.
Rain falls on the hills above town. Some of it soaks into the ground. The rest runs downhill in thin streams. Those streams join together to make Ravensbrook Creek. The creek flows into the reservoir. The town pumps water out of the reservoir to a treatment plant, and the plant sends clean water to every tap in town.
The hills form the edge of the watershed. Rain that lands on the far side of a hill flows away from Ravensbrook. It drains into a different creek and ends up in a different town's water. The high ridge acts like a wall between the two watersheds.
Mr. Salazar pointed to a storm drain on Maple Street. "Where do you think that water goes?" he asked. Nadia guessed the treatment plant. She was wrong. The storm drain carries rain straight to the creek. That water is not cleaned first. Whatever sits on the street goes along with it.
That answer changed how Nadia saw her town. Motor oil in a driveway, litter on a sidewalk, and extra lawn fertilizer can all wash into the creek during a storm. From the creek they travel to the reservoir that holds her drinking water. The land and the water are joined together.
Near the reservoir, the class saw a wide strip of tall grass and young trees along the bank. Mr. Salazar called it a buffer. The plants slow the runoff and trap some of the dirt and chemicals before they reach the water. A buffer is one simple way that people protect a watershed.
On the bus ride home, Nadia looked at the hills in a new way. She could almost trace the watershed line herself. She understood that caring for the reservoir means caring for all the land that drains into it, and not just the water itself.
Questions
- What is a watershed, according to the passage?
- Follow the path of the water in Ravensbrook. Name, in order, the places rain travels through before it reaches a tap in town.
- Why does rain that lands on the far side of a hill end up in a different town's water?
- Nadia guessed that the storm drain led to the treatment plant. What is the correct answer, and which detail in the passage tells you so?
- Explain why a driver who spills motor oil on a driveway could affect the town's drinking water. Use evidence from the passage.
- What is a buffer, and how does it help protect the reservoir? Cite the detail that supports 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: A watershed is all the land where rain drains to the same place. The passage gives this definition when Mr. Salazar traces the hills, and it names Ravensbrook Reservoir as that place for the town.
- Answer: Hills, thin streams, Ravensbrook Creek, the reservoir, the treatment plant, then the tap. The passage lists this path when it describes rain running downhill into streams that join the creek, which flows to the reservoir the town pumps to the plant.
- Answer: Because the ridge at the top of the hills is the edge of the watershed. The passage says rain on the far side drains into a different creek, so the ridge acts like a wall between two watersheds.
- Answer: The storm drain carries rain straight to the creek without cleaning it. The passage states the water "is not cleaned first" and that whatever is on the street goes with it.
- Answer: Answers will vary but should note that a storm can wash the oil into a storm drain, which leads to the creek and then the reservoir that holds the town's drinking water, as the passage explains when it lists oil, litter, and fertilizer.
- Answer: A buffer is a strip of tall grass and young trees along the bank. It helps by slowing the runoff and trapping some dirt and chemicals before they reach the water, as the passage states near the reservoir.
Differentiation
Support
Provide a simple labeled diagram of the water's path (hills, streams, creek, reservoir, plant, tap) for students to reference while answering. Allow questions 1 and 4 to be answered with a short phrase or a labeled arrow instead of a full sentence.
Extension
Ask students to draw the ridge line of an imagined watershed around their own school and mark two storm drains, then write two or three sentences explaining where that runoff would go and one thing residents could do to protect it.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "watershed," "reservoir," "runoff," "buffer," and "ridge" with a quick sketch beside each word. Pair students to read the passage aloud in sections, and provide a sentence frame for question 5: "The oil could reach the drinking water because ___."