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Reading passage Kindergarten Science

The Night the Lights Went Out in Hollypark: A Water Tank Story

A kindergarten read-aloud about a fictional town whose crew fills the hilltop tank before a storm, so taps still run after the wind knocks the power out.

Objectives

  1. Students will retell the order of events in a story about a town water tank.
  2. Students will explain why water still reached the taps after the power went out.
  3. Students will tell why the crew filled the tank before the storm arrived.

Vocabulary

Pump
A pump is a machine that adds energy to water to move it or push it uphill, doing the job gravity cannot do on its own. Water systems use many different kinds of pumps to move water from wells, through treatment, and out to customers.

Also: tank, hill, power, storm, crew

Teacher overview

This original story is set in Hollypark, a fictional town with a water tank on the hill above its houses. Read it aloud rather than assigning it, and let students answer by speaking, pointing, or drawing, since the work here is listening comprehension and cause-and-effect reasoning rather than decoding. The story gives kindergartners two ideas at once: a town crew watches the forecast and gets ready before bad weather, and a tank set high on a hill keeps water moving to taps even when every pump in town has stopped.

The misconception this passage addresses is the assumption that a pump pushes water to the tap at the moment somebody opens it, which leads students to expect the taps to stop whenever the power stops. Ask the class to predict what happens at Maya's tap before you read that part, and let the story settle the question. If a water tower, standpipe, or hilltop tank is visible from your building, point to it during the second reading so the height in the story attaches to something students have seen.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Hollypark: A Water Tank Story — Kindergarten Science
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

The Full Tank on the Hill

Hollypark is a small town. A big water tank sits up on the hill. The tank holds the town's water. Pumps push the water up to it. Then the water waits up there.

One day the radio had news. A big storm was coming that night. The water crew got to work. They ran the pumps all afternoon. They filled the tank to the very top.

The storm came after dark. Wind broke a power line. The lights went out. The pumps went quiet. Now nothing pushed the water.

Maya woke up in the dark. She wanted a drink. She turned on the tap. Water came out. Maya asked her dad why.

Her dad pointed out the window. The tank stood high on the hill. "Our water is up there," he said. "It does not need a pump right now. It runs down the hill to us."

The town drank tank water all night. In the morning the power came back. The pumps hummed again. They filled the tank back up. The crew was ready for the next storm.

Questions

  1. Where does Hollypark keep its water?
  2. What did the water crew do before the storm came?
  3. Why did the crew fill the tank first? Use the story to tell why.
  4. The pumps were off. How did water still get to Maya's tap?
  5. Put these in order. The storm came. The crew filled the tank. The power came back.
  6. Tell one thing that would have been hard for the town if the tank had been empty.

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: In a big tank on the hill. The story says the tank sits up on the hill above the town and holds the town's water.
  2. Answer: They ran the pumps and filled the tank to the top. The story places this in the afternoon, after the radio news about the storm.
  3. Answer: So the town would have water after the storm. Accept any answer meaning they knew the storm was coming and got the water ready first.
  4. Answer: The tank is high on the hill, so the water ran down to her house on its own. The story has her dad point out the window and say the water does not need a pump right then.
  5. Answer: The crew filled the tank, the storm came, the power came back. That is the order the three events happen across the story.
  6. Answer: Accept any true hardship the student can name, such as no water to drink, no water to wash with, or no water to cook with, since the story shows the tank was what the town used all night.

Differentiation

Support

Read the story a second time in short chunks, stopping after each part to ask what just happened before going on. For question 5, hand these students three picture cards showing the crew, the storm, and the sunrise, and let them lay the cards in order instead of saying the order aloud.

Extension

Ask these students to tell what the crew does the next time the radio warns of a storm, and to say why that plan works. Have them draw the town with the tank on the hill and an arrow showing which way the water moves when the pumps are off.

ELL supports

Pre-teach tank, pump, and crew with a simple drawing of each one, pointing at every drawing as the word is said. Accept pointing at the drawing of the tank as a full answer for questions 1 and 4, and provide the sentence frame "The water came down because the tank is ___" with the word high available on a card.

Extensions

Fill a clear bottle, set it on a shelf above a table, and run a length of tubing from it down into a cup so students can watch water travel with nobody pushing it. Invite someone from the local water department to tell the class what their crew does when a storm is in the forecast, which gives students a real version of the crew in the story.