Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Tap-Out Testimony”

After reading about the struggles that characters in Dry face during a disaster that their government does little to prevent or ameliorate, students demonstrate their understanding of narrative voice and theme by creating testimony from a hearing on the disaster.

One of the themes of Dry is that it is important to prepare for disaster—and, if possible, to prevent it from happening in the first place. But the government in this novel does little to prevent the drought, and when it finally becomes a crisis, the government is ill-prepared to respond. This has devastating consequences for the people of California. After a crisis like this, especially when the official response has been inadequate, the government sometimes holds hearings to help figure out what went wrong and how to do better in the future.

In this project, you will choose one of the characters from Dry and create two pages of testimony from an imagined governmental hearing. Your character’s testimony will be in the form of a transcript, which is the written-down version of something that is originally spoken aloud.