Graphic organizer Grade 6 English Language Arts
Keeping Sedgeworth's Pool Open in a Dry Summer: Grade 6 Organizer
An argument-planning frame with an eight-item evidence bank about a fictional town's pool during a drought, ending with a box for the evidence a writer set aside.
Objectives
- Students will state a claim about a local water decision in one sentence.
- Students will pair each reason with a specific piece of evidence from a source bank.
- Students will explain why they set aside one available piece of evidence.
Vocabulary
- Reservoir
- A human-made lake, usually created by a dam, that stores water for later. Reservoirs supply cities and farms and help control floods.
- Evaporation
- Evaporation happens when liquid water, often warmed by the sun, turns into an invisible gas called water vapor that rises into the air. It is how water leaves oceans, lakes, and puddles.
- Drought
- A long stretch of drier-than-normal weather that leaves too little water for people, farms, and nature. Droughts build slowly and can last for years.
Also: claim, reason, evidence
Teacher overview
This organizer is a vertical argument frame, built as a stack of labeled boxes that runs from a claim through two reasons and their evidence to a closing sentence and one unusual final box. The scenario is a fictional town deciding whether to keep its public pool open during a dry summer, and students select from an eight-item evidence bank rather than inventing support. The last box asks which item they chose not to use and why, because sixth graders need practice deciding which evidence serves a claim once they have gathered more of it than an argument can hold. A common problem to watch for is students writing two reasons that are the same reason in different words, which the frame surfaces as soon as both evidence boxes point at the same bank item.
Organizer
Sedgeworth is a fictional town whose reservoir is low after a dry spring. The council will decide whether to open the public pool for the summer, open it with limits, or keep it closed. Read the evidence bank, then fill in every box in the frame. Each evidence box needs the letter of the item you used.
Evidence bank
- A. The reservoir was 41 percent full on July 1, the lowest reading in nine years of town records.
- B. Filling the pool at the start of the season takes about as much water as forty households use in one day.
- C. Once the pool is full, most of the water it loses goes to evaporation. A cover pulled over the pool at night cuts that loss by more than half.
- D. The pool is the only place in Sedgeworth with lifeguards on duty, and the town's swim lessons are held there.
- E. The water department has asked residents to stop watering lawns until the reservoir recovers.
- F. Closing the pool for the whole summer would save less water than the town's lawns use in a week.
- G. Three families told the council they have no way to reach the county pool, which is eleven miles away.
- H. If the reservoir drops below 30 percent, the state requires the town to file a water shortage plan.
Argument frame
| Box | What goes in this box | Your writing |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | One sentence saying what the council should do | |
| Reason 1 | Why you think so, stated in general terms | |
| Evidence for Reason 1 | One item from the bank, with its letter, and how it supports the reason | |
| Reason 2 | A second reason that is genuinely different from the first | |
| Evidence for Reason 2 | A different item from the bank, with its letter, and how it supports the reason | |
| Connecting words | The words you will use to join each reason to its evidence | |
| Closing sentence | Your claim again, in new words | |
| Left out on purpose | One bank item you chose not to use, and one sentence saying why |
Prompts:
- Read your two reasons aloud. If you removed one, would your argument lose something the other still covers? If not, replace one of them.
- Which single bank item would be hardest for someone who disagrees with you to explain away?
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Completed Exemplar
| Box | What goes in this box | Model response |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | One sentence saying what the council should do | The council should open the pool this summer with a night cover and shorter hours rather than closing it. |
| Reason 1 | Why you think so, stated in general terms | Closing the pool would take away something the town needs without saving much water. |
| Evidence for Reason 1 | One item from the bank, with its letter, and how it supports the reason | Item F: closing the pool all summer would save less water than the town's lawns use in a week, so the sacrifice is large and the savings are small. |
| Reason 2 | A second reason that is genuinely different from the first | The pool can stay open and still use much less water than it usually does. |
| Evidence for Reason 2 | A different item from the bank, with its letter, and how it supports the reason | Item C: most of the pool's loss is evaporation, and a cover at night cuts that loss by more than half, so a covered pool draws far less refill water. |
| Connecting words | The words you will use to join each reason to its evidence | because, since, which shows, according to the town's records |
| Closing sentence | Your claim again, in new words | A covered pool on shorter hours keeps swim lessons running through the summer while giving up very little of the water the reservoir needs. |
| Left out on purpose | One bank item you chose not to use, and one sentence saying why | Item G, about the three families who cannot reach the county pool. It is a real problem, yet it says nothing about water, and my argument is about how much water the choice actually saves. |
Prompt answers:
- Answer: The two reasons in the model do different work. The first is about what the town loses by closing, and the second is about how much water an open pool actually needs, so removing either one leaves a gap. A pair such as "the pool is important to families" and "people would miss the pool" would fail this test, since one covers the other.
- Answer: Answers vary with the claim. For the model argument, item F is hardest to explain away, because it compares the pool directly against the town's lawn watering and shows that closing the pool is a small saving. A student arguing for closure would most likely lean on item A or item H, which describe how close the reservoir is to a level that forces the town to act.
Differentiation
Support
Give these students a claim box with two ready-made claims to choose between, and mark the bank items that fit each one with a small symbol so the search narrows. Model the first reason and evidence pair aloud using an item nobody will need, then hand the frame over. Allow the "left out on purpose" box to be answered with the item letter and a phrase rather than a full sentence.
Extension
Ask these students to complete a second frame arguing the opposite claim, then to write three sentences naming which of the two arguments they find stronger and what made the difference. A second option is to write the sentence the council would put in the town newsletter announcing the decision, using only the evidence the student's frame cites.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "reservoir," "evaporation," "cover," "lifeguard," and "shortage" with simple drawings, including a pool with and without a cover. Provide the evidence bank as cut-apart strips that can be physically placed in the frame before anything is written. Offer the frames "The council should ___ because ___" for the claim and "This shows that ___" for each evidence box.
Extensions
Have students find out whether their own community has ever asked residents to limit outdoor water use, then add one local item to the evidence bank and write two sentences explaining which side of the Sedgeworth argument that item would support.