Scary Stories

Strengthen the bonds of friendship within your class with a reading of E.B. White's award-winning novel, Charlotte's Web. Focusing on the unique characters in the story and the relationships they develop, young readers draw from their...

There are some words out there that just make you say, "Wow!" Encourage your class to find and use these words in their writing to make their work more interesting and complex. This packet goes through the writing process, beginning with...

Get your writers composing their own short stories by following some or all of the ideas included here. You'll find short lessons and activities, handouts and assignment pages, sample paragraphs and sentences, and all sorts of great...

Eleven engaging activities make up a story guide that accompanies Dr. Seuss' Hooray For Diffendoofer Day! Scholars design a fictional classroom setting including scary face tests, writing job descriptions, adapting the book into a play,...

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.

Scary stuff! Whether approached as the first horror story or a "serious imaginative exploration of the human condition," Frankenstein continues to engage readers. Here's a packet of activities that uses Mary Shelley's gothic novel to...

“It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.” You’re never too old for Dr. Seuss and using The Sneetches and The Lorax is a great way to introduce readers to allegories, parables, and literary symbolism. The lessons...

How do events, characters, setting, and tone work together to create an engaging short story? Would the impact or theme of a story be different if one of these elements were changed? After reading Mark Twain's slightly screwy "A Ghost...

There's nothing like the prospect of writing a scary story to get your middle schoolers' writing juices flowing! In the lesson presented here, pupils listen to scary short stories read to them by the teacher. Then, a discussion ensues...

What better way to motivate reading than with scary stories, especially around Halloween. Using a Goosebumps series set of books, learners participate in daily reading of chapters from their book. Each day they focus on a different story...