A good read for fifth grade students is The Terrible Wave by Dahlstedt.  This easy to read book is a wonderful guided reading book that will also tie in the current event of the Oroville Dam overflow last week.  A written assignment may be assigned to followup the reading with a compare and contrast of the current Oroville Dam overflow to the past dam failure in Johnstown, PA.  You may want to use a thinking map diagramming cause and effect or a double bubble to find similarities and differences in the dam failures.

Click to access Thinking-Map-Templates.pdf