Lesson plan Grade 8 English Language Arts
Road Salt in the Burnage Wells: A Grade 8 Research Lesson
Students read three short sources about rising salt in a fictional town's wells, write a research question about cause, and generate focused follow-up questions.
Objectives
- Students will write a focused research question that asks about cause rather than sequence.
- Students will weigh how reliable each of three sources is for a given question.
- Students will generate follow-up questions and name a source that could answer each one.
Vocabulary
Key words: source, research question, chloride, well field, reliability
Teacher overview
Burnage is a fictional town, and the three sources in the handout were written to behave the way real sources behave: each one answers a different question, and none of them answers the question students most want answered. A water district letter reports what the tests show, a public works summary reports what the town does in winter, and a homeowner's letter reports what one family tastes. The misconception this lesson targets is the belief that a source is either reliable or useless, when a source that cannot prove a cause may still be the only record of when a problem started.
Procedure
Hook (5 min): Write one question on the board: "Why does the water at some houses in Burnage taste salty in March?" Ask students who could answer it. Many lists name the water department and stop there. Leave the list visible for the rest of the period.
Reading the sources (12 min): Students read Sources A, B, and C and mark each with one margin note naming the question that source answers. Remind them that a source that never mentions a well may still matter.
Modeled question writing (8 min): Model the difference between a question about what happened and a question about why it happened, using the fictional sources. "When did chloride start rising in Well 3?" can be settled by one source. "Why has chloride risen in the wells closest to the highway?" requires all three. Write both on the board and label them.
Source comparison (15 min): Students complete handout items 1 through 3, which ask them to summarize one source, quote the strongest evidence from another, and compare how much weight two sources can carry. Press any student who writes "Source C is wrong" to say what Source C is good evidence of.
Follow-up questions (10 min): Students complete items 4 and 5. Ask two volunteers to read a follow-up question and name who could answer it, then compare those names against the list from the hook.
Closure and exit ticket (5 min): Students complete item 6 and turn in the handout. Scan for paragraphs that cite at least two sources. If fewer than about three out of four do, open the next class by rereading Source B and asking what it adds that Source A cannot.
Student Handout
The three sources below are fictional, written for this lesson about the town of Burnage.
Source A. Letter from the Burnage Water District to well owners, June 2026. The district tests each of its five wells four times a year. Chloride in Well 3 has risen from 24 mg/L in 2016 to 96 mg/L in our most recent round. Well 2 shows a smaller rise. Wells 1, 4, and 5, which sit farther from Route 12, have changed very little. Chloride at these levels is not a health violation, but at higher levels it gives water a salty taste, and it does not break down or settle out. We will continue quarterly testing and will report every result.
Source B. Burnage Public Works winter operations summary, May 2026. Crews treat 46 lane-miles of road each winter. Salt goes down when pavement temperature falls below freezing, and trucks make more passes during storms that start as rain. Two winters ago the town began wetting salt with brine before spreading, which cut the total tons used. The salt pile is stored on a paved pad behind the highway garage on Route 12. Snow plowed from the garage lot is pushed into a ditch at the north edge of the property.
Source C. Letter to the editor, Burnage Weekly, April 2026. Our tap water has tasted salty every March for the past three springs. It clears up by summer. We live a quarter mile north of the highway garage. A neighbor says our water softeners are to blame, and another says it is the road crews. I would like someone to tell us which.
- Write one sentence that summarizes what Source A reports about Wells 2 and 3.
- Which source best explains how salt used by the road crews could reach a well? Quote the sentence that most strongly supports your answer.
- Sources A and C both describe salty water. Explain one reason a researcher would treat Source A as stronger evidence, and name one thing Source C shows that Source A does not.
- Write one research question that all three sources together help answer. Your question must ask why something happened, not only what happened.
- List two follow-up questions that none of these sources can answer, and name a person or office who could answer each one.
- Using evidence from at least two sources, write a paragraph of four to six sentences that answers your research question from item 4.
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: Chloride has risen in both wells, with a large increase in Well 3 and a smaller one in Well 2, while the three wells farther from Route 12 have changed little. Accept any one-sentence summary that keeps the comparison.
- Answer: Source B. The strongest supporting sentence is that snow plowed from the garage lot is pushed into a ditch at the north edge of the property, since that describes a path salty meltwater could take away from the pile. Also accept the sentence about the salt pile stored on a paved pad behind the highway garage, if the student explains that rain or melt could carry salt off the pad.
- Answer: Source A is stronger because it reports repeated measurements taken four times a year by the district, while Source C reports one family's impression of taste. Source C shows something Source A does not, which is when residents notice the problem and that it appears every March and fades by summer.
- Answer: Accept any question that asks about cause and needs more than one source. A model question: "Why has chloride risen in the fictional town's wells nearest Route 12 while the wells farther away have not changed?"
- Answer: Accept any two reasonable questions with a named source for each. Models: "How much salt is stored on the pad and is the pad covered?" answered by the public works supervisor, and "How deep is Well 3 and which direction does groundwater move under the garage?" answered by the district's hydrogeologist or well driller.
- Answer: Accept any paragraph of four to six sentences that answers the student's own question and cites at least two sources. A strong response connects the storage pad and plowed snow in Source B to the pattern in Source A, in which only the wells nearest Route 12 changed, and treats the March taste reports in Source C as a timing clue rather than proof.
Differentiation
Support
Give these students a version of the fictional handout with one sentence per source already highlighted and a three-column chart labeled what the source measures, when it was written, and what it cannot tell us. Reduce the independent work to items 1, 2, and 4, and provide the question frame "Why did ___ change while ___ did not?"
Extension
Ask students to write a fourth source that would settle whether the salt pile or the road itself is the larger contributor in this fictional town, then explain in two sentences what that source would have to contain to be convincing.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "chloride," "well field," "brine," and "ditch" with a labeled map of the fictional town showing the highway, the garage, and the five wells. Allow items 1 through 3 to be answered in phrases, and pair students for the reading step.
Extensions
Students turn their synthesis paragraph into a short letter to the fictional Burnage Weekly, keeping every claim tied to a named source and closing with the one question they would ask the town first.