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Lesson plan Grade 9 English Language Arts

Revising Hallowell's Hydrant-Flushing Notice for Two Audiences

A grade 9 ELA lesson in which students revise one fictional water district's hydrant-flushing facts twice, once for residents and once for the utility board.

Objectives

  1. Students will identify which details a resident audience needs and which details a board audience needs.
  2. Students will revise impersonal sentences into direct sentences that name the actor and the action.
  3. Students will explain why a detail useful to one audience is unnecessary for another.

Vocabulary

Hydrant flushing
Opening fire hydrants on purpose to let water rush through the pipes and carry away rust and sediment. It keeps the water fresh and the pipes clean.

Also: audience, purpose, register, sediment, concise

Teacher overview

Hallowell Water District is a fictional utility that opens the hydrants in its Barrow Hill neighborhood every spring to push out the iron sediment that settles in older mains, which turns tap water rusty for a few hours on each street the crew works. The district has to describe the same two weeks of work to two very different readers: residents who want to know whether their laundry is safe, and a board that wants to know why crews are on overtime. Students take one set of facts and write it twice, then defend what they left out of each version. One point is worth naming before students begin: impersonal phrasing such as "discoloration may be experienced" can pass for professional writing, yet it hides who is acting and leaves the reader unsure what to do.

Procedure

Hook (5 min): Project the two sentences below without comment and ask students which one they would rather find hanging on their front door, and why. "Discoloration of the water supply may be experienced by customers in the affected service area." "Our crews will flush the hydrants on your street this week, and your water may look rusty for a few hours." Take three or four responses and write the words students use to describe the difference.

Direct instruction (10 min): Define audience, purpose, and register, and give each a one-sentence working definition students copy. Explain the two documents the class will produce: a door hanger left on the front doors of Barrow Hill, and a memo to the district board. Ask what each reader must be able to do after reading, and record both answers on the board. Model revising one sentence for each audience, thinking aloud about which facts survive the cut and why.

Guided practice (12 min): Distribute the Student Handout. In pairs, students complete items 1 through 5, sorting the district's facts by audience and analyzing the two draft sentences. Circulate and press pairs that sort a fact into both columns to say what each reader would do with it.

Independent writing (15 min): Students complete items 6 through 10 alone. Items 6 and 7 are sentence revisions; items 8 and 9 are the openings of the two documents; item 10 asks for the reasoning behind one cut. Remind students that the door hanger is read standing up and the memo is read next to a long agenda.

Closure and exit ticket (8 min): Students trade item 8 with a partner and underline any word the partner would have to look up. Then each student copies the answer to item 10 onto an index card and turns it in. Scan the cards before the next class: if fewer than eighty percent name a specific detail rather than a general reason such as "the board needs more information," reteach the sorting step with a second set of facts.

Revising Hallowell's Hydrant-Flushing Notice for Two Audiences — Grade 9 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Every detail below is fictional and belongs to the Hallowell Water District scenario.

  • Crews will open hydrants in Barrow Hill from March 3 through March 14, on weekdays only, between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m.
  • Flushing sends water quickly through the mains and carries out the iron sediment that settles there over the year.
  • Water on a street being flushed may look rusty or cloudy for two to three hours.
  • The water stays safe to drink during flushing, though rusty water can stain white laundry.
  • Residents should run one cold tap until the water clears and should wait to wash white laundry until it does.
  • The work costs the district about 9,000 dollars in crew overtime and uses about 400,000 gallons of water.
  • Flushing cuts the number of discolored-water complaints the office takes in summer and shows crews which hydrants no longer open properly.

Two draft sentences sit in the district's files:

Sentence A: "Discoloration of the water supply may be experienced by customers in the affected service area during the scheduled program."

Sentence B: "It has been determined that unidirectional flushing will be conducted in accordance with the annual maintenance schedule."

  1. List two details from the district's facts that a Barrow Hill resident needs and a board member does not.
  2. List two details that a board member needs and a resident does not.
  3. Complete this sentence about purpose: "The door hanger should get residents to ..."
  4. Complete this sentence about purpose: "The board memo should get board members to ..."
  5. Sentence A never says who acts. Name the actor Sentence A leaves out.
  6. Rewrite Sentence A for residents in fifteen words or fewer, naming the actor and the action.
  7. Rewrite Sentence B for the board so that it keeps the term "unidirectional flushing" but states plainly who decided what.
  8. Write the first two sentences of the door hanger, assuming a resident reads them while standing at the door.
  9. Write the opening sentence of the board memo, assuming a board member reads it beside a long agenda.
  10. Explain why one detail you put in the board memo would not help a resident standing at the door.

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: Accept any two resident-facing details, such as the dates and hours of the work, the warning that water may look rusty for two to three hours, the assurance that the water stays safe to drink, or the instruction to run a cold tap and delay white laundry.
  2. Answer: Accept any two board-facing details, such as the overtime cost, the volume of water used, the reduction in summer complaints, or the fact that flushing reveals hydrants that no longer open properly.
  3. Answer: Accept any purpose statement that names an action, such as "run a cold tap until the water clears and hold off on white laundry while the crew works on their street."
  4. Answer: Accept any purpose statement that names a decision or judgment, such as "approve the overtime and understand what the district gets for it."
  5. Answer: The crews of the Hallowell Water District. The sentence names only the customers and the result, "discoloration," so the crews causing it never appear. Even in the active voice ("Customers may experience discoloration"), the utility would still be missing.
  6. Answer: Accept any revision of fifteen words or fewer that names the actor and the effect, such as "Our crews will flush your street's hydrants, and your water may look rusty briefly." The actor and the visible effect must both appear.
  7. Answer: Accept any revision that keeps the technical term and names the decider, such as "The district has scheduled unidirectional flushing in Barrow Hill as part of this year's maintenance plan."
  8. Answer: Accept any two-sentence opening that leads with what is happening and what the reader should do, such as "Our crews are flushing hydrants on your street this week. Your water may look rusty for a few hours, so run a cold tap until it clears before washing white laundry."
  9. Answer: Accept any single sentence that leads with the decision or the cost, such as "Spring flushing in Barrow Hill runs March 3 through March 14 and will require about 9,000 dollars in crew overtime."
  10. Answer: Accept any explanation that ties the cut to what the reader does, such as: a resident standing at the door cannot act on the overtime figure, because the resident's only decision is when to run the tap and when to do laundry.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the facts already sorted into two columns, with two entries in each column left blank for them to place. Provide item 6 as a fill-in frame that supplies the sentence shape and asks only for the actor and the effect, and let items 8 and 9 be dictated to a partner before writing.

Extension

Ask these students to write a third version for a fourth-grade class touring the plant, then write two sentences explaining which changes they made for age rather than for purpose. The distinction between adjusting register and adjusting content is the point of the task.

ELL supports

Pre-teach audience, purpose, register, sediment, and concise with a short definition and one example each. Provide a two-column chart with the headings "the reader wants to know" and "the reader must do," and allow items 1 through 5 to be answered in that chart before students write full sentences.

Extensions

Have students take a real notice sent home from school, such as a schedule change or a bus route revision, and write two versions of it, one of two sentences for a parent and one of two sentences for the principal. They then explain in one paragraph which fact appears in only one version and what that reader does with it.