Short Story Commercials

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.

Story chains connect literary concepts, reinforce context clues, and even help learners predict what's coming next! Using words from the next chapter of Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons, middle schoolers craft story chains to...

Guide young readers through their first book report with a story map designed for a Dr. Seuss book. After your class finishes their story of choice, they list the title, characters, conflict, and other elements of literature on the book...

Thirty-six pages familiarize scholars with the story and vocabulary of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. After reading and listening to an abbreviated version of the holiday tale learners show what they know about the sequence...

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.

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...

Writers consider what makes a story powerful as they listen to a short story about Frederick Douglass. Once finished, small groups complete a worksheet to analyze what makes the story so enduring.

Provide these templates as aids for pupils as they work to compose summaries of both stories and informational texts. The first two frames provide sentence starters to help learners structure their summaries and include all the necessary...

Deafening, dusty, debris. Such were the working conditions in the 1800s textile industry as portrayed in Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie. Scholars watch a short video clip about life and work in the mills. Next, they work...

Where does it happen? When did it happen? These are two questions that play a key role in understanding the setting of a story. The fourth and final video in a Language Arts playlist uses a song to explain how the setting connects to...