Pick A Short Story

Middle schoolers explore the theme of "The Californian's Tale" by Mark Twain. After reading Twain's short story, they identify and study its literary theme. Additionally, they analyze information and relationships in the piece, and write...

Use short stories to teach English? Yes! Designed as a professional development opportunity for English language teachers, the ideas in this booklet can easily be adapted to advanced ESL/ELL classes.

A short story is only as strong as its characters, development, and conflicts. Encourage the young authors in your class to plan their stories based on the elements of narrative writing, all provided in brainstorming graphic organizers.

Do your young authors suffer from writer's block when they try to write short stories? Access their natural creativity with C-Gor, the writing monster! The instructional activity takes aspiring authors through a new writing process...

Discover the genre of short stories with sixth graders. They discuss the characteristics of short stories from the book America Street. Then, they compare and contrast movies and television shows and chart story characteristics. Various...

Introduce your class to Glogster with this literary analysis lesson. At the end of your short story unit, they choose one literary element to apply to three short stories and make an online poster using Glogster. Samples are included. If...

Introduce your class to Edgar Allan Poe with a series of mostly self-guided tasks and assignments. Class members follow the list of tasks, starting by watching a video with background information and ending with a compare-and-contrast...

Students read short story selections, and work with classmates to produce commercials using digital video equipment.

Learn about the rise of mass media and the popularity of the short story in this video [4:07] from the American Masters film Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive. Poe wrote more than seventy short stories and created his own set of rules for...

Examine story development and historical disaster with your class. Learners view a video depicting the incidents surrounding The Triangle Shirtwaist Disaster. They use graphic organizers and the Internet to gather enough information to...