Worksheet Kindergarten Social Studies & Civics
The Broken Pipe on Plum Street: Who Came to Help?
A read-aloud kindergarten worksheet about a water main break on a made-up street, with nine picture-and-tell items about who helped and what they did to fix it.
Objectives
- Students will retell the order of events in a neighborhood water main break.
- Students will name two people or crews who helped fix the broken pipe.
- Students will draw and name one tool the repair crew used.
Vocabulary
Key words: pipe, leak, crew, dig, fix
Teacher overview
A water main break is one of the few occasions when buried infrastructure becomes visible to a kindergartner, because the hole in the road, the orange cones, and the crew in vests are all above ground. This worksheet uses a made-up street, Plum Street, where a neighbor notices water rising out of the pavement and calls it in, and where a town crew arrives, digs, replaces the pipe, and restores service. Read the story aloud twice before children answer, and treat every item as an oral or drawn response rather than a written one. For item 4, sketch a truck and a boat on the board so children can point to or circle one.
If your own town has had a main break within memory, name it during the read-aloud. Children who saw the cones and the water coming up can describe it for the rest of the class.
Student Worksheet
Read this to the class. Read it two times.
Water came up out of Plum Street. It made a big wet spot. A pipe under the road broke. Rosa lives on Plum Street. She saw the wet spot. She called the town crew. A truck came fast. Two workers dug a hole. They put in a new pipe. They filled the hole back up. Then the water came back on.
Now do each one. You may point, draw, or tell.
- Who saw the wet spot first?
- What broke under the road?
- Who did Rosa call?
- Draw a ring around the one that came to help: a truck or a boat.
- How many workers dug the hole?
- What did the workers put in the hole?
- Tell what came first, what came next, and what came last.
- Why was this work good for Plum Street?
- Draw one thing a worker used. Tell your teacher its name.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: Rosa. The story says Rosa lives on Plum Street and saw the wet spot before anyone else did.
- Answer: A pipe. The pipe that broke was under the road, which is why the water came up through the street instead of out of a tap.
- Answer: The town crew. Accept "the town," "the water people," or a similar phrase, since the idea that a town has workers for this is the point of the item.
- Answer: A truck. A boat is the distractor; the crew drove a truck to the wet spot.
- Answer: 2 workers. The story names two workers digging the hole.
- Answer: A new pipe. Accept "a pipe." Children who say "dirt" are describing the next step, so ask them what went in before the dirt.
- Answer: First the pipe broke and water came up, next the crew came and dug, last the water came back on. Accept any retelling with those three events in that order.
- Answer: The people on Plum Street got their water back. Accept answers about drinking, washing, cooking, or the street not being flooded any more.
- Answer: Any tool named in the story or shown in the drawing, such as a shovel, a truck, or a new pipe. Scribe the child's word next to the drawing.
Differentiation
Support
Give these children three picture cards showing the break, the crew digging, and the tap running, and let them lay the cards in order for item seven instead of retelling in words. For items one through three, offer two picture choices each and let the child point. Sit with them for the read-aloud so you can pause after each sentence.
Extension
After item nine, ask these children to draw the pipe under the road with the water inside it and to dictate one sentence saying where that water was going before the break. Invite them to write a short thank-you line for the crew, using their own spelling, and to read it back to the class.
ELL supports
Pre-teach pipe, dig, crew, and fix with gestures the whole class copies, such as a digging motion and a turning motion for fix. Provide the sentence frames "The ____ came." and "They put in a ____." Accept answers in a child's home language and scribe the English word beside them.
Extensions
Take the class on a short walk, with adult helpers and staying on the sidewalk, to look for the round metal covers, valve boxes, and hydrants that mark where pipes run under your own street, and count how many you pass. Many utilities will send a crew member with a length of pipe to a kindergarten classroom for fifteen minutes, which lets children handle a real section of the pipe the story describes.