Graphic organizer Grade 3 Health & Consumer Science
Safe or Unsafe? A Grade 3 Home Water Safety Organizer
A grade 3 compare-and-sort organizer where students use a short reading passage to decide whether home water habits are safe or unsafe, with a completed teacher exemplar.
Objectives
- Students will sort water habits as safe or unsafe using evidence from an informational text.
- Students will explain, using text evidence, why certain water habits are safe or unsafe.
- Students will identify the purpose of a boil-water advisory.
Vocabulary
- Boil water advisory
- A public notice telling people to boil tap water before drinking it because germs may have entered the pipes, often after a main break or a loss of pressure.
- Contaminant
- A contaminant is anything in water that should not be there, whether it is a germ, a chemical, or too much of a natural mineral, that could make the water unsafe or unpleasant to use. Treatment plants are built specifically to find and remove contaminants before water reaches the tap.
Teacher overview
This organizer is a three-column sorting frame: students read a short background passage about home water safety, then decide whether six everyday water habits are safe or unsafe and explain each choice using a detail from the passage. Sorting habits this way turns a health and consumer-science topic, deciding when water is safe to use, into a concrete reading and reasoning task rather than a list of rules to memorize.
Organizer
Background passage: Water at home usually comes from a town's water system. Some families have their own well instead. The workers who run a town's water system test the tap water often. Sometimes the water is not safe for a while. Then the workers send out a notice. It is called a boil-water advisory. The notice tells people to boil their water before they drink it. They keep boiling it until the problem is fixed. Some water is never tested. Floodwater is one example. Pool water is another. Water from an old, uncovered rain barrel is a third. Untested water can carry contaminants. Contaminants are germs or other things that can make people sick. Washing hands before meals works best with clean tap water. If you are not sure water is safe, ask an adult first. That is the safest choice.
| Water habit | Safe or unsafe? | Why? (use the passage) |
|---|---|---|
| Drinking tap water straight from the sink during a boil-water advisory, without boiling it first | ||
| Drinking water your family gets from the town's regularly tested tap | ||
| Drinking water from a flooded street after a storm | ||
| Washing your hands with clean tap water before lunch | ||
| Drinking water that has been sitting in an old, uncovered rain barrel for weeks | ||
| Asking an adult before drinking water you are not sure about |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Completed Exemplar
| Water habit | Safe or unsafe? | Why? (use the passage) |
|---|---|---|
| Drinking tap water straight from the sink during a boil-water advisory, without boiling it first | Unsafe | The passage says a boil-water advisory means people should boil their water before drinking it until the problem is fixed. |
| Drinking water your family gets from the town's regularly tested tap | Safe | The passage explains that the workers who run the town's water system test the tap water often, so it is safe unless a boil-water advisory says otherwise. |
| Drinking water from a flooded street after a storm | Unsafe | The passage lists floodwater as an example of water that has not been tested and can carry contaminants. |
| Washing your hands with clean tap water before lunch | Safe | The passage states that handwashing before meals works best with clean tap water. |
| Drinking water that has been sitting in an old, uncovered rain barrel for weeks | Unsafe | The passage groups untested water sitting in an old, uncovered rain barrel with other water that can carry contaminants. |
| Asking an adult before drinking water you are not sure about | Safe | The passage says the safest choice is to ask an adult before drinking water you are unsure about. |
Differentiation
Support (below grade level)
Read the background passage aloud twice before students begin, and complete the first row of the organizer together as a class model. Allow the Why column to be completed by underlining the exact sentence in the passage instead of writing a new sentence.
Extension (above grade level)
Ask students to add a seventh row of their own, describing a water habit not mentioned in the passage, marking it safe or unsafe, and writing an explanation that uses the same reasoning pattern as the passage (tested versus untested water).
ELL supports
Pre-teach contaminant, boil-water advisory, and tested with simple pictures (a water sample in a lab, a printed advisory notice, a rain barrel). Allow the Safe/Unsafe column to be marked with a simple check or X, and allow the Why column to be completed by copying the supporting sentence directly from the passage.