Explore the world of copyright law with a variety of activities to instill the importance of respecting creative property. Scholars watch an animated tale then take part in a grand conversation detailing the video's main idea, details,...

Introduce "The Inn of Lost Time" by Lensey Namioka to your middle schoolers with a reader's resource page. It includes links to different activities, including a creative writing prompt about losing fifty years of your life, and a...

Language arts is made up of many parts. Learners review the parts of a sentence, as well as how to make a simple sentence into a complex sentence, before examining full paragraphs and identifying the topic, body, and concluding sentence...

Are your pupils ready to move beyond a thesis statement by adding additional detail to their introductory paragraphs? Provide this handout to give your class some ideas for spiffing up their work. The page includes a sample paragraph...

Get ready to read The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 with a lesson about historical fiction. Spanning several centuries, the resource prompts learners to guess the historical era of a story based on a word or phrase...

Bloom's Taxonomy is a great way to address the many levels of comprehension. With explanations and examples of each level, you can create questions that focus on knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Poetry is all about sound and rhythm. The sound of the words, the rhythm of the lines, and the emotional atmosphere created by these elements and the literary devices poets use, compress whole stories into a few stanzas. The specialized...

If you're tired of defining allusion, onomatopoeia, and satire for your language arts students, hand out a complete list of literary devices to keep the terms straight. Each term includes a definition that is easy to understand and...

How does or society punish people who break the law? What effect does guilt have on a person's life? In what way does or society demand we conform to certain conventions? Such questions, found in this study guide, are sure to...

Teach your young readers how to summarize a text using a strategy called Somebody Wanted But So. Kids identify the character (Somebody), the motivation (Wanted), the conflict (But), and the resolution (So). The resource comes with...

Considering using Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies? Here's a resource designed to be used before and during a reading of her powerful story of the murder of the Mirabal sisters. Included in the packet is a vocabulary...

Let's Look Around! is the theme of a unit that offers a plethora of challenge activities. Enhance your scholars' learning experiences and reinforce concepts with activities such as writing a book about farm animals, an...

Breath new life into your class's study of dinosaurs with this extensive collection of materials. Offering everything from a printable T-rex mask, word searches, and connect-the-dots activities to informational handouts, hands-on...

This unit from the Yale University on elements of the short story is designed to develop student comprehension skills, particularly making inferences and generalizing. It also involves students in reading a number of short stories to...

This Cambridge History of English and American Literature site examines the contributions of Washington Irving to the development of the American short story genre.

Some excellent guidelines to consider when evaluating your setting in a short story or novel. Discusses the importance of setting, some examples, as well as practical advice in setting your story. W.11-12.3d Sensory/precise lang narratives

Two excerpts from Early American author Washingtom Irving about his preference for writing short works and why.

As part of a revision and writing section of BBC Bitesize, this page provides several tips involved in writing dialogue and description for short story fiction.

Short article gives excellent tips concerning how to use visual elements to enhance a written story. Article was written specifically for children's literature, but can also apply to other genres as well.

Read Edward Everett Hale's famous short story here. Scroll down and choose "Previous," for criticism and interpretation of the story by Henry S. Canby.

At this website, read Daniel Defoe's "In Defence of His Right." This short story is seven pages long.

Here, you can read the full text of Oliver Goldsmith's short story, "The Disabled Soldier."

Brief biography of American novelist and short story writer Kate Chopin.

This site from the encyclopedia Wikipedia provides a brief biography on the life and work of novelist William Faulkner is found on this site. It contains information on his style of writing and the themes of many of his works. There is...