Writing prompt Grade 11 English Language Arts
The Summer Ardith Farm's Well Ran Dry: A Narrative Prompt
A grade 11 narrative prompt built on a fictional farm's well record, asking students to write three scenes about a falling water table from one chosen vantage point.
Objectives
- Students will write a narrative that develops one event sequence across three scenes with a consistent point of view.
- Students will select precise details from a technical record and use them for characterization rather than exposition.
- Students will end a narrative without stating its meaning outright.
Vocabulary
- Drawdown
- Drawdown is how far the water level in a well drops when a pump pulls water out. The harder and longer you pump, the bigger the drawdown gets.
- Aquifer
- An aquifer is an underground layer of rock, sand, or gravel that holds water in the tiny spaces between its grains. Wells reach down into aquifers to bring water up to the surface.
Also: static water level, in medias res, vantage point, understatement
Teacher overview
A falling water table is a slow event, which makes it a difficult and worthwhile subject for narrative. This prompt gives students the well record of the fictional Ardith Farm outside the town of Tolbury and asks them to build three scenes around the summer its household well began pulling air. The misconception the prompt is built to correct is the belief that a narrative about a technical subject must first explain the technical subject; students commonly open with a paragraph of hydrogeology and then have no story left to tell. The background is deliberately fuller than the narrative needs, so that selection becomes the writer's first decision.
Prompt
Background.
Ardith Farm is a fictional eighty-acre orchard and hay operation outside the town of Tolbury. The farmhouse well was drilled in 1962 to a depth of one hundred ten feet. For most of its life the water stood about thirty-eight feet below the ground when the pump was off, and the well produced roughly eighteen gallons per minute, which was more than the house and the barn ever needed.
The last four years have been dry. The well log kept by the family records the static water level each spring: seventy-one feet in the first of those years, seventy-nine in the second, eighty-eight in the third, and ninety-six this April. The pump sits at one hundred four feet.
Three years ago, a larger operation two miles west drilled a pair of irrigation wells into the same aquifer, each to a depth of four hundred feet. Those wells run from June through September. The county has no permit requirement for agricultural wells, and no one has measured what the new wells draw or how far their influence reaches.
On the twelfth of July, the kitchen tap ran, then sputtered, then ran again. By the end of that week the pump was pulling air every afternoon between two o'clock and six. A well driller told the family by phone that deepening the well would cost about eleven thousand dollars and that his earliest opening was in October. Tolbury's water main ends a mile down the county road. Hauling water costs less per month than a loan payment and takes an hour each way.
Writing task.
Write a narrative of five hundred to nine hundred words about the summer the Ardith well ran dry. Tell it in three scenes from a single vantage point you choose: a member of the family, the well driller, the neighbor who drilled the irrigation wells, or a county employee who takes the family's call. Use at least three specific details from the background, and let those details do characterization rather than explanation. Your ending may resolve the situation or refuse to, but it must not tell the reader what the story means.
Planning Organizer
| Category | Your notes |
|---|---|
| Vantage point and what this narrator can and cannot know | |
| Scene 1: the moment something is noticed, with one sensory detail | |
| Scene 2: the complication and a decision that costs the narrator something | |
| Scene 3: the ending, including what changes and what stays the same | |
| Three details from the background you will use, and where | |
| One technique you will attempt: opening in the middle, compressing time, or dialogue that withholds |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Exemplar & Rubric
Exemplar response.
The tap coughed twice before it gave anything, and my mother did not look up from the sink. She had already heard it on Tuesday.
By the second week of July we had a schedule none of us had agreed to. We ran the laundry before noon, and the dishes before noon, and anything else that needed water before noon, because at two o'clock the pump would start hunting and by three it would be pulling nothing but air, and the sound it made then was the sound of something working hard at a job that had ended. My father would go out and switch it off at the breaker and come back in without saying anything and sit down with the well log.
The log is a spiral notebook, and it has been in the same drawer since my grandfather drilled the well in 1962. He wrote a hundred and ten feet on the first page and underlined it. My father writes one number a year, in April, and until four years ago the numbers were boring. Now they read seventy-one, seventy-nine, eighty-eight, ninety-six. The pump hangs at a hundred and four. My father did the subtraction in front of me once and then put his pencil down as if he had been caught at something.
He called a driller, who quoted eleven thousand dollars to go deeper and said his first opening was in October. My father said thank you in the voice he uses for people who have not done anything wrong. Then he called the county, and a woman there explained politely that agricultural wells do not require a permit, so the office had no record of how much the two four-hundred-foot wells two miles west were pulling, or whether they reached us. She was kind about it. She said she wished she had better news, and she did wish it, and that was the whole of what the county could offer.
We hauled water in August. Two hundred gallons at a time in the flatbed, an hour down to the Tolbury standpipe and an hour back, four times a week. I rode along because someone had to hold the strap. On the way back the truck moved differently under the weight, slower into the turns, and my father drove it the way you carry something breakable up a staircase.
The neighbor came by once, in September, when his irrigation shut down for the season. He stood in the yard with his hat in his hand and said he had not known. My father said that he believed him. They talked about hay prices for ten minutes and then the neighbor got back in his truck. Neither of them said the word water.
In October the driller came and took the well to two hundred forty feet. The water came up clear and cold and my mother filled a glass and drank it standing at the sink, and afterward we ran the dishwasher at four in the afternoon because we could. My father went out to the shed and did not come back for a while.
In April he opened the notebook and wrote the year and the number and closed it again. He did not underline anything.
Rubric.
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Narrative technique and point of view | Vantage point shifts or is unclear; events are summarized rather than shown | Vantage point is consistent but the narrator observes without being affected | Vantage point is consistent, and what the narrator can and cannot know shapes the telling | Vantage point is consistent and load-bearing; limits on the narrator's knowledge create the story's tension |
| Structure and sequencing | No discernible scenes; events run together | Three scenes are present but the sequence could be reordered without loss | Three scenes build on one another, and time is handled deliberately | Sequencing does structural work, using compression, delay, or a return to an earlier image |
| Detail and precision | Few or no details from the background; details are generic | Uses background details as exposition, explaining rather than showing | Uses at least three background details, and they characterize as well as inform | Selects details sparingly and lets them carry meaning the narration never states |
| Ending and control of voice | Ends abruptly, or states the moral outright | Ends with a summarizing sentence that explains the story | Ends on an action or image, leaving interpretation to the reader | Ends on a restrained image whose meaning depends on everything placed before it |
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the vantage point already chosen and Scene 1 already located at the kitchen tap on the twelfth of July, so their planning begins at the complication. Provide a detail bank listing six background facts with a blank beside each for the scene it will appear in, and set a floor of three. Allow the draft to be written scene by scene across two class periods with a conference between them.
Extension
Ask students to write a second, much shorter version of Scene 3 from the neighbor's vantage point, then to write a paragraph explaining which of the two endings makes the county's lack of records feel more consequential and why. The comparison makes point of view visible as a choice rather than a default.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "static water level," "aquifer," "standpipe," and "haul" with a labeled cross-section showing the old water level, the new one, the pump depth, and the deeper irrigation wells nearby. Provide a scene-planning frame in three boxes with the questions "Where are we," "What changes," and "What does the narrator do about it." Allow students to tell each scene aloud to a partner before writing, and to draft dialogue before narration.
Extensions
Have students exchange narratives and mark every sentence that explains rather than shows, then return the drafts with one sentence circled as the strongest candidate for deletion. Writers revise by cutting only that sentence and repairing what it leaves behind, which teaches restraint faster than a general instruction to show rather than tell.