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Lesson plan Grade 3 Social Studies & Civics

Rainy Mossgate, Dry Redsand: A Grade 3 Two-Town Water Lesson

Students compare rainy-day tables for two fictional towns, build a scaled bar graph, and explain how each town's water habits fit the weather it gets.

Objectives

  1. Students will explain how families in a rainy town and a dry town use water differently, and why.
  2. Students will build and read a scaled bar graph where one square represents two rainy days.

Vocabulary

Rain barrel
A rain barrel is a container that catches rainwater from a roof downspout so it can be used later to water plants. It saves drinking water and keeps some runoff out of the storm drains.

Also: season, scaled bar graph, storage tank

Teacher overview

Mossgate and Redsand are two fictional towns invented for this lesson. One sits in green hill country that gets rain in every season, while the other sits in red-rock country where rain is uncommon. Comparing their rainy-day counts side by side gives students a genuine geographic reason to practice this grade's new skill of scaled bar graphs. The misconception to watch for is counting each square as a single day when the scale is two days per square; the guided graph build is designed to surface and correct that error before the independent questions.

Procedure

Hook (5 min): Describe two postcards. One shows Mossgate: green hills, a full creek, moss on the fence posts. The other shows Redsand: red rock, a dusty road, one tough little tree. Ask students which town they think gets more rain, and how a visitor could tell without seeing a single rainstorm.

Story of two towns (10 min): Describe how families in each fictional town handle the rain they get. In Mossgate, most families keep a rain barrel under the gutter for the garden, lawns stay green on their own, and nobody thinks much about a long shower. In Redsand, families store water in a big covered tank, yards are gravel and desert plants instead of grass, and washing the truck means a bucket, not a hose. Neither town is doing it wrong, because each one fits its habits to the rain it actually gets.

Build the graph together (15 min): Post the rainy-day table from the handout. On grid paper, model graphing Mossgate's winter count with the scale one square equals two rainy days, thinking aloud: fourteen days means seven squares, because 7 × 2 = 14. Show that an odd count, such as Mossgate's 9 summer days, ends with half a square. Have students finish both towns' bars on their own grids. Circulate and ask spot-check questions such as "How many days is a bar of three squares?" to catch anyone counting squares as days.

Handout questions (10 min): Students answer handout questions 1 through 5 using the table and their finished graphs.

Closure (5 min): Formative check: ask students to hold up fingers for how many squares tall a bar of 10 rainy days would be. Look for five fingers across the room; reteach the scale tomorrow if more than a handful of students show ten.

Rainy Mossgate, Dry Redsand: A Grade 3 Two-Town Water Lesson — Grade 3 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Rainy days in two made-up towns, season by season:

Season Mossgate rainy days Redsand rainy days
Spring 12 4
Summer 9 1
Fall 10 3
Winter 14 6

Use the table and your graph to answer each question.

  1. How many rainy days does Mossgate get in spring and summer together?
  2. How many more rainy days does Mossgate get in winter than Redsand gets in winter?
  3. How many rainy days does Redsand get in the whole year, adding all four seasons?
  4. On your graph, one square stands for 2 rainy days. How many squares tall is Mossgate's winter bar?
  5. Name one way Redsand families fit their habits to dry weather. Use the story you heard.

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: 21 rainy days. Spring plus summer for Mossgate is 12 + 9 = 21.
  2. Answer: 8 rainy days. Mossgate's winter count minus Redsand's is 14 − 6 = 8.
  3. Answer: 14 rainy days. Redsand's year is 4 + 1 + 3 + 6 = 14.
  4. Answer: 7 squares. Fourteen days at two days per square is 14 ÷ 2 = 7 squares.
  5. Answer: Any one habit from the story, such as storing water in a big covered tank, keeping a gravel yard with desert plants instead of grass, or washing the truck with a bucket instead of a hose.

Differentiation

Support

Give students a graph frame with Mossgate's spring bar already drawn and labeled, and let them build the remaining bars by matching. For question 3, provide the addition frame 4 + 1 + 3 + 6 = ___.

Extension

Ask students to invent a third town with rainfall between the two, fill in its four season counts, graph it at the same scale, and write one sentence about a habit its families might have.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "season," "scale," "barrel," and "tank" with sketches, and post the four season names with picture cues. Allow question 5 to be answered by drawing the habit and labeling it with a word or phrase.

Extensions

Have the class keep its own rainy-day tally for a month on the classroom calendar, then graph the result at the one-square-equals-two scale and discuss which fictional town the school's month looked more like, and whether one month is enough to know.