High schoolers respond to 15 questions about short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and his works. Using the Cliffs Notes website they may also link to an online interactive quiz on the stories at the bottom of the page.

After reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories, provide your high schoolers with these questions. You could use these to prompt higher level thinking for an upcoming test, or provide them as essay prompts. 

Pitch your best news story to your news team, or the peers in your journalism class, with a lesson about finding, reporting, and presenting a story. After watching clips of different examples, as well as strategies for finding...

Starting at the very beginning may be a very good place to start, but it can also be very difficult for emergent writers. Help them get started by providing them with a setting, a main character, and a basic plot.

For those class members who have mastered the basic concepts and need extra challenges, here's a packet of activities sure to engage them in stories about American immigration and exploration. Kids may design a dramatic...

Students explore storytelling by participating in an image analysis activity. In this story structure lesson plan, students read the book Cookie's Week by Tomie dePaola and retell the story to their teacher in sequential order. Students...

West Side Story is widely known as a modern-day Romeo & Juliet. Learners read a list of characters from the play and list their counterparts from Romeo & Juliet before completing a vocabulary enrichment activity and word...

Cozy up and listen to a recording of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Three Little Javelinas. Then, lead your class in a compare and contrast of the two stories by creating a Venn diagram.

First and second graders explore the importance of having a beginning, middle, and end when writing stories. For this story writing lesson, students write short stories using the story diamond as a guide. They invite their parents to an...

Fourth graders use computer software, Kidspiration, to create a graphic organizer detailing main characters, setting, problem, solution, and theme of their favorite short story. Students also discover how graphic organizers can help them...

Practice using feelings as a way to reflect on past experiences. The poem The End and the text Tell Me a Story Mama are used to identify feeling words. As an extension, pupils participate in a service learning project and...

Readers of all ages correctly use appropriate verbs in their speech and writing. The focus of this lesson is on the proper use of helping verbs.

Students use an object to tell an interesting story from their lives. They write and present a short story about an interesting episode from their life and gather objects in a story bag, which illustrates their story to the class.

Elementary writers will create short stories with their classmates' help, publishing the books using computer programs. The first learner writes a sentence to start the story, and each classmate adds a sentence to the story. The original...

Young scholars write and publish a short story using KidPix computer software. They discuss the basic elements of a story, observe a demonstration of how to use KidPix, select a setting and characters, and print out their background...

Help your pupils track the plot of a short story with this SMART Board activity. Using the short story "The Dinner Party" by Mona Gardner (though the lesson would work with any other short story), they define the exposition, rising...

First graders will be creating and filling in a graphic organizer using Kidspiration, as a pre-writing activity for their short story piece. They then use their graphic organizers to write their entire short story. Once written, the...

Learners will read a short story in a basic and advanced version. They then answer 3 comprehension questions and 5 vocabulary questions.

Here is a great way to explore narrative writing! Learners review a previously constructed story map and identify the characters, setting, and main events in the book Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock retold by Eric A. Kimmel. They...

Intended for learners struggling with or having issues using auxiliary verbs, this activity has them orally compose sentences using one of the provided helping verbs. They will attempt to find patterns in groups of verbs and make class...

Explore Native American gardening traditions with a instructional activity on companion planting. Based on the concept that certain crops grow better when planted near other specific crops, kids research the gardening method with...

Craft your own fairy tale based on Momotaro, a Japanese story referenced in Kyoko Mori's Shuzuko's Daughter. A list of nouns guide learners in writing their own story, and predicting what might happen in the novel.

Learn the stories a formula holds. An interesting lesson takes a unique approach to teach how to use formulas. Beginning with a formula, learners predict what the variables stand for and then use the formula to make calculations and tell...

Help your class listen and respond to a fictional story by creating a story structure mobile illustrating the main characters, setting, plot, problem, story events, and solution. Using a coat hanger, they will create an artistic element...