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Project Grade 7 English Language Arts

Wintergreave Water Careers Feature Pages: A Research Project

Grade 7 students research four water-sector roles and write feature pages for a fictional utility's recruiting booklet, attributing every figure to a supplied fact card.

Objectives

  1. Students will write a profile that reports a role's daily work in plain language.
  2. Students will attribute every figure in their pages to the fact card that supplied it.
  3. Students will describe four education paths without ranking one above another.

Vocabulary

Apprenticeship
A way to learn a skilled job by working alongside experienced workers while getting paid. Water utilities use apprenticeships to train new operators and technicians.

Also: profile, attribution, licensure, certificate, operator

Teacher overview

The Wintergreave Regional Water Authority is a fictional utility that wants four recruiting pages for its booth at a county fair, one page per job. Over four sessions students research four real water-sector roles from a supplied packet and write the pages, and the packet gives them four different routes into the field so that no page can be written as the sensible choice next to a foolish one. The teaching note worth making at the start is that students often write career profiles as advertisements, so their first drafts contain adjectives and no working day. A second problem shows up in how they use figures: a national number about one job gets repeated as though it described all four, which is exactly the error the fact card and the attribution rule exist to catch.

Wintergreave Water Careers Feature Pages: A Research Project — Grade 7 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Project Brief

Wintergreave and its water authority are fictional, and the four people quoted below were written for this project. The figures on the fact card are real and are labeled with their sources.

Your assignment. Write four feature pages for the Wintergreave Regional Water Authority recruiting booklet. One page covers one role. Readers are eighth graders and their families at a county fair booth.

What each page contains.

  • A headline naming the role in plain words.
  • A profile of 150 to 200 words about what the person does.
  • A box titled "How people get into this work," describing the education path.
  • A list of three to five things a day in this job can include.
  • One direct quotation from the interview card, with the speaker named.
  • A line naming where any figure on the page came from.

Your constraints.

  • Every figure comes from the fact card. You add none, and you change none.
  • The four paths appear as four ways in, not as a ranking. No page calls a path a backup, a shortcut, or the smart choice.
  • Where a figure describes only one of the four roles, your sentence says so.
  • Every page stays inside the word range, and the booklet includes a source list.

Interview card A. Ruth Ellery, water treatment plant operator, Wintergreave. "I run the plant on second shift. I read the turbidity and chlorine numbers every hour and adjust the chemical feed when the raw water changes. I started here right after high school as a helper, trained on shift, and passed my state exam for the next license class two years later. The part people do not expect is the writing. Every adjustment I make goes in a log somebody may read years from now."

Interview card B. Marcus Oyelaran, instrumentation and controls technician. "The plant is full of sensors, and my job is keeping them honest. I calibrate them, chase down bad readings, and fix the wiring when a pump will not start. I did a two-year program at the community college and an apprenticeship. Most weeks I am half electrician and half detective."

Interview card C. Dana Whitcombe, environmental engineer. "I design the pipes and basins before anyone builds them. This year I am sizing a new clearwell and rewriting the plan for the west side mains. I studied civil engineering for four years, worked under a licensed engineer, and then sat for my own license. I spend more time explaining tradeoffs to the board than I expected."

Interview card D. Sol Barrantes, hydrologist. "I study where the water comes from before it reaches a plant at all. I measure stream flow, map the aquifer, and build models of what a dry year does to the supply. That work needed a master's degree for me, and some people in my field go further. Half my job is arguing about uncertainty in a way people can act on."

Fact card. Use these exactly as written, or leave them out.

  • Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators earned a median of $60,020 per year in May 2025. The lowest tenth earned less than $39,110 and the highest tenth earned over $91,060.
    Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.
  • About 10,000 openings each year are projected, on average, from 2025 to 2035 for water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators, even though the total number of operator jobs is projected to decline 6 percent. All of the openings come from replacing workers who retire or move to other jobs. This figure covers operators, not the other three roles. Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.
  • The United States employed about 131,000 water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators in 2025. Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.
  • EPA estimates that roughly one third of the water workforce is eligible to retire within the next 10 years. In 2016, only about 10 percent of water workers were 24 or younger, compared with 12.5 percent of all U.S. workers. Source: EPA Water Infrastructure Sector Workforce page and Brookings, Renewing the Water Workforce (2018).
  • Becoming an operator usually takes a high school diploma, training on the job, and a state license earned by exam. Licenses come in classes tied to plant size and experience. Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook and state certification programs.

Milestones

  1. Session 1, read and sort. Read the four interview cards and the fact card. Build a chart with a row for each role and columns for daily work, education path, and what the person says is surprising. Mark which fact-card figures apply to which role. Turn in the chart.
  2. Session 2, draft two pages. Draft the profile, the education box, and the daily-work list for two roles. Check each page twice, once for the word range and once for whether every figure names its source. Turn in the two drafts.
  3. Session 3, draft the other two and check the framing. Draft the remaining two pages. Then reread all four and underline any word that ranks one path above another. Replace each one. Turn in four drafts with the underlines visible.
  4. Session 4, assemble and extend. Choose one quotation per page, write the source list, and assemble the booklet. Then write two focused questions you would ask a real person in one of these roles that the cards did not answer. Turn in the booklet and the questions.

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

Rubric
Criterion 4 Exceeds 3 Meets 2 Approaching 1 Beginning
Accuracy and attribution Every figure is exact, attributed on the page, and limited to the role it actually describes Every figure comes from the fact card, is unchanged, and names its source One figure is unattributed, or one is stretched to a role it does not cover Figures are invented, altered, or applied to all four roles without warrant
Reporting the work All four profiles show a reader an actual working day, including the parts that are tedious Each profile describes daily work in plain language within the word range One or two profiles read as advertisements rather than descriptions Profiles list adjectives and never say what the person does
Fair treatment of paths Each path is presented on its own terms, and the booklet would read fairly to a family favoring any of them No path is ranked, called a backup, or treated as a lesser choice One phrase ranks a path, or one page reads as more enthusiastic than the others The booklet recommends one path and treats the others as fallbacks
Quotation, form, and sources Quotations are chosen for what only that speaker could say, and every page element is present and well placed One named quotation per page, all six page elements present, source list complete A page is missing an element, or a quotation appears without a speaker Quotations are unattributed or altered, and the source list is missing

Differentiation

Support

Assign these students two roles rather than four and shorten the profile to 100 to 130 words. Give them one completed model page, along with a second model that breaks the ranking rule, and have them mark the offending words before drafting. Provide the daily-work list as a checkbox set drawn from the interview cards, so the list becomes selection rather than invention.

Extension

Ask these students to add a fifth page for a role the packet does not cover, such as a utility billing clerk or a laboratory analyst, using only what they can source from a utility website, and to note on the page which claims they could not verify. A second option is to write the two-minute script the booth volunteer would read aloud, keeping every figure attributed.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "operator," "calibrate," "license," "apprenticeship," and "aquifer" with a labeled drawing of a plant, a control panel, and a well field. Provide the frames "According to the fact card, ___," "A day in this job can include ___," and "People come into this work by ___." Allow the daily-work list to be drawn and labeled, and let students draft the profile as answers to four supplied questions before joining them into a paragraph.

Extensions

Have students find the job listings page of a real water utility or state agency and compare two postings with the pages they wrote, noting which requirements the packet never mentioned. Then have them write a short paragraph on what a recruiting page leaves out that a job posting has to say plainly.