Denver Art Museum
Putting Images into Words
Engage your class in art analysis of Indian Look-Alike by Melanie Yazzie. Using this work of art as inspiration, writers compose a poem or short story. After a peer review session, the teacher conveys information about the work of art as...
Curated OER
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Students, in groups, read and analyze the short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor. They present their findings tot he rest of the class and then connect the various themes discussed to outside material, events...
Education Oasis
Creative Writing Unit: Analyzing, Interpreting, Discussing and Writing Various Genres of African-American Literature
A six-week unit takes high schoolers through various works of African-American literature, including poems, plays, and short stories. The lesson plan format includes a week-by-week description of activities, goals, materials, and...
Curated OER
Where in the United States Are We?
Students spend the lesson identifying the location of the fifty states and the capitals. Using a software program, they retrace te outline of each state numerous times. To end the lesson, they write a story about a state and city of...
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 1, Unit 1, Lesson 14
Karen Russell's short story "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" has a unique structure that adds value to the story. With the fourteenth activity in a unit about literary analysis and textual support, analyze how Russell has...
Curated OER
Discovering Angel Island: The Story Behind the Poems
Poems carved into the wooden walls of the Asian immigrant prisons on Angel Island provide upper elementary graders an opportunity to study not only the story behind the poems but to also focus on the figurative language employed by the...
Urban Education Exchange
Lessons and Units: The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963 5TH GRADE UNIT
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 in the text. In...
Scholastic
Thomas Jefferson and Monticello: An Introduction to Writing Historical Fiction
Thomas Jefferson is one of the most recognized names and faces in America—but is there more to the third president of the United States? Upper elementary and middle schoolers conduct research on Jefferson, his famous home at Monticello,...
Digital Writing and Research Lab's – Lesson Plans
Teaching Close Reading through Short Composition/Revision
This activity may have writers evaluate short compositions, but their subjects are quite tall: great Americans. Pupils read one another's compositions and closely examine how specific phrases and diction contribute to shaping American...
K20 LEARN
Mood and Tone at Owl Creek Bridge: Mood and Tone
Two versions of movie trailers for the film Mary Poppins launch a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious lesson about how mood and tone impact a reader's experience of work. Using the provided list, readers identify the words that create the...
EngageNY
End of Unit Assessment, Part 1: Text-Dependent Questions and Storyboard Draft: “You Can Do a Graphic Novel” Excerpt
Eyes on the finish line. Serving as the first part of the end of unit assessment, learners answer questions based on a text about how to write a graphic novel. Using what they've learned, they then create a storyboard about the invention...
Syracuse University
Civil War
What was it like to enlist as a soldier in the Civil War? By using enlistment papers, young scholars consider this question. After they've looked at the primary source and discussed it, they create a short story of a fictional soldier to...
EngageNY
Planning for Writing: Revisiting “Key Elements of Mythology” and Determining a Theme in the Myth of Cronus
Refresh my memory please. Scholars quickly read over the Myth of Cronus to refresh their memories of the story. They then get in groups and write parts of the myth on sticky notes that relate to the elements of mythology, sticking their...
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 2: Unit 1, Lesson 2
Make up your mind to complete a lesson plan about "The Tell-Tale Heart" and forever rid yourself of simple sentence structures. As ninth graders analyze the first two paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, they consider how text...
Curated OER
Will You Pick My Cotton?
Use this cross-curricular history lesson plan to work on your students' informational writing skills. After listening to songs and stories related to Sultana, they engage in a several activities to boost their understanding of slavery...
Curated OER
"The Lottery"
Designed to open a unit on the suspense/horror genre, this plan hooks readers with an activity that mirrors the action of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" (without the grisly ending). Use either the twenty-minute 1969 film or...
PBS
The Power of Personal Narrative
Personal narratives are powerful things. Whether told from the first-person or third-person point of view, whether in the form of an essay, a short story, novel, or video, whether fiction or fact, they capture readers and give them...
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 1, Unit 1, Lesson 5
Finding the central idea in a text is equally important in fiction and nonfiction. Work on analyzing a piece of writing for the central idea with Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," complete with supporting...
EngageNY
Mid-Unit 2 Assessment: Analyzing Narrative Structure and Author’s Craft: Part 1
Using the resource, scholars complete a mid-unit assessment to gauge their learning at the halfway point of the unit. Pupils read the myth "The Harvest That Never Came" and plot its narrative structure.
Curated OER
Unit Plan: Short Stories
Tenth graders complete a unit of lessons on the story elements of Sherlock Holmes short stories. They analyze the plot elements, complete graphic organizers, read and discuss the plots, observe a person and take notes, and analyze an...
Curated OER
Fairy Tales Unit Ideas
Students listen to children's fairy tales and watch them on a video. Afterward, they list the heroes from each story. Students write a short paragraph about a typical day for the hero. Students dress up like their character and give a...
CPALMS
Analyzing Vonnegut's View of the Future and His Commentary on the Present in Harrison Bergeron
Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" engages adolescents with its theme about the dangers of complete societal equality. Learners complete a graphic organizer to track literary elements in the story, as well as an inference...
Curated OER
Make a Memory with Movie Maker
There is nothing more exciting than allowing learners to express themselves through a creative medium. In groups, they write narrative stories, focusing on building a strong storyline and dialogue. Next, they transform their stories into...
Maine Content Literacy Project
Understanding Theme
The ninth in a fourteen-lesson series, this plan marks a sort of midpoint in a unit devoted to the study of short stories. Pupils learn about theme and work on their short story projects by adding to their blogs, checking in with the...