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Project Grade 7 Health & Consumer Science

Brackenwood Hollow Well Owners: A Family Water Health Plan

Teams build a four-page booklet, a testing calendar, and a cost table for a fictional private-well household that stay inside a fixed yearly testing budget.

Objectives

  1. Students will name four things a private well should be tested for and explain the health reason for each.
  2. Students will build a yearly testing calendar and cost table that stay inside a fixed household budget.
  3. Students will write a four-page family booklet and present a three-minute table talk about it.

Vocabulary

Coliform bacteria
Coliform bacteria are common bacteria found in soil, on plants, and in the guts of animals. Most are harmless, but finding them in drinking water warns that germs may be getting in.
Nitrate
Nitrate is a form of nitrogen that plants use as food. It gets into water from fertilizer, animal waste, and septic systems, and too much of it is unhealthy for both people and streams.

Also: private well, wellhead, benchmark

Teacher overview

Households on private wells are their own water utility, because federal drinking water rules cover public systems and leave private wells to the owner. In this four-session project, teams write a family water health plan for the fictional community of Brackenwood Hollow, where most homes draw from wells, and present it at a community health fair. One misconception is worth addressing on day one. Well water is often assumed to be clean because it comes from underground and tastes fine, yet coliform bacteria and nitrate have no taste, color, or smell, and a lab test is the only way to find them.

Brackenwood Hollow Well Owners: A Family Water Health Plan — Grade 7 Health & Consumer Science
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Project Brief

Driving question: what should a well-owning family test for, how often, and what should they do when a result comes back bad?

The scenario. Brackenwood Hollow is a fictional community of about 400 homes, all of them on private wells. The county health office has asked your team to prepare a family water health plan for its fall health fair. Your audience is a parent or grandparent who has never had the well tested.

Your booklet must cover these four tests and say how often each one should be done:

  • Total coliform bacteria, which signals that surface water or waste has reached the well.
  • Nitrate, which matters most for a baby under six months old whose formula is mixed with well water.
  • Lead, which usually comes from the home's own plumbing rather than the aquifer.
  • PFAS, a group of long-lasting chemicals now regulated in public water systems.

Two of those regulated benchmarks are useful even though they do not legally apply to a private well. The lead action level for public systems is 15 ppb and drops to 10 ppb in 2027, and the limit for PFOA and PFOS is 4.0 ppt each. A well owner can compare a lab result against those numbers to judge whether to act.

Constraints your plan must meet:

  • The booklet is 4 pages, no more.
  • Yearly testing must fit a household budget of 150 dollars in our scenario.
  • Use this fictional county lab price list: bacteria 30 dollars, nitrate 25 dollars, lead 35 dollars, PFAS panel 300 dollars.
  • One page must answer what a family should do the night a result comes back bad.
  • The writing must be plain enough for a fifth grader to read aloud to a grandparent.

Deliverables: the 4-page booklet, a one-year testing calendar, and a 3-minute table talk delivered at the health fair station.

Milestones

  1. Session 1, sort the risks. Produce a risk table with one row for each of the four tests, naming what the test looks for, the health reason it matters, and who in a household is most at risk from it.

  2. Session 2, plan and price the year. Produce a cost table and a one-year calendar showing which tests happen in which month and what the year costs. Your team must decide what to do about the PFAS panel, because it does not fit the yearly budget, and write one sentence defending that decision.

  3. Session 3, draft the booklet. Produce all four pages in draft, including the page that tells a family what to do the night a bad result arrives, with at least three specific steps on that page.

  4. Session 4, table talk and revision. Deliver the 3-minute talk to another team acting as fair visitors, answer two of their questions, and turn in a revision list naming what your team would change.

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

Rubric
Criterion Emerging Developing Proficient Advanced
Health accuracy Names tests without a health reason, or states a reason that is wrong. Gives a general health reason for some tests. Gives a correct health reason for all four tests and names who is most at risk for at least two of them. Also explains why taste and smell cannot substitute for a lab test, using bacteria or nitrate as the example.
Plan and budget The calendar or the cost table is missing. Calendar and costs are present but the total misses the budget or the arithmetic is wrong. Calendar and cost table are correct, stay inside the yearly budget, and handle the PFAS panel with a stated decision. Also compares two ways to cover the PFAS panel and defends the better one with the price list.
Booklet clarity Text is copied from the brief with no organization for a family reader. Organized but uses terms a family reader would not know. Four clear pages, plain sentences, and a what-to-do-tonight page with at least three steps. Also anticipates two questions a worried family would ask and answers them on the page.
Table talk Reads the booklet aloud and does not answer questions. Covers part of the plan and answers one question. Covers the plan in 3 minutes and answers both visitor questions using the booklet. Adjusts the talk for the visitor's situation, such as a household with an infant, and still finishes on time.

Differentiation

Support

Give these teams the risk table with the four test names already entered and two health reasons filled in, and provide the cost table with the price column completed so their work is the addition and the calendar. A model booklet page from a different topic shows what a finished page looks like.

Extension

Ask teams to add a fifth page for a household that has just had a flood, since a flooded wellhead needs a different sequence of shock disinfection, retesting, and bottled water until the retest is clear. Have them explain why the order of those steps matters.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "well," "aquifer," "sample," and "benchmark" with a simple cross-section drawing of a well and the ground around it. Allow the booklet's first draft in the student's stronger language, and provide a talk outline card with one sentence stem for each of the three minutes.

Extensions

Invite a county environmental health specialist or a certified lab courier to describe how a sample is collected, held cold, and delivered within its holding time, which is the step families most often get wrong. Teams can also map which of their four tests a nearby public water system already runs for its customers, and use that comparison to explain what a private well owner takes on themselves.