The Story Elements

Identify story elements with your middle schoolers. Readers will identify the setting, main characters, plot, exposition, and conflict, but best of all, they'll explain how they know each of these story elements. 

Language arts learners don't need a lecture about poetry; they listen to poetry every day on the radio! Apply skills from literary analysis to famous songs and beautiful lyrics with a lesson about literary devices. As class...

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.

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...

It can be difficult to find the theme of a book or story if you don't know the questions to ask. Teach your kids to discern the universal theme in works of literature with a set of activities that promote critical thinking and active...

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...

Encourage scholars to retell their favorite short story or folktale, adding personal details to make it their own. After reading their book of choice several times, story tellers retell a tale verbally to their classmates. 

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...

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...

Help your class to learn to identify the key elements of a short story using previously read works. They work in small groups to answer questions about point-of-view, conflict, characters, and setting. Then, they use a graphic organizer...