15 Short Stories for Students Who Love Suspense and Plot Twists
We absolutely L-O-V-E using short stories throughout the year to help guide our instruction and to keep our students engaged in their learning. Short stories have also come in handy this year with remote learning. It is pretty much impossible to teach remotely the Core novels that we love to teach. For that reason, we have relied on using even more short stories to enliven our instruction.
There are a myriad of reasons why short stories are an awesome resource to utilize in your language arts class. We love using them to assess student understanding of the reading literature standards and to teach plot, mood and tone, conflict, characterization, point of view, theme, foreshadowing, predicting and inferencing skills, visualization, schema, and figurative language. The list goes on. As you can tell, there really are no drawbacks to diving in to a great short story.
Short Stories That Our Students Love and That We Love to Teach
It is hard to find the balance between a lesson that our students love and one that we love to teach. These short stories are so fun and exciting that we never tire of reading them over and over, year after year.
Short Stories with a Great Plot Twist
"He-y, Come on Ou-t!" - This is a great science fiction short story that delves into the dangers of taking advantage of our planet. It is super short and it packs a punch.
"Love"by William Maxwell - You can find this lesson as part of our plot unit in our Teachers Pay Teachers store.
"The Necklace"- Oh the perils of want and greed. This twisted ending will be sure to make your students shriek. You can find our lesson for the short story here.
"Story of an Hour"- This one is a slow burn. The ending is what makes this story a surefire hit. We have a fun lesson for this story here.
"The Lottery"- This dystopian short story is a classic and it also is chock full of suspense. You can check out how we teach this lesson here.
"Lamb to the Slaughter"- our lesson is here. You can find the Alfred Hitchcock video adaptation here.
"Charles"- Shirley Jackson knows her way around a plot twist. Our students get a kick out of Laurie and Charles and their kindergarten hijinks. We have a fun lesson for analyzing this story here.
"Test" by Theodore L. Thomas is a sci-fi/ realistic fiction blended story that even caught me by surprise at the end. Your students will definitely get a shock when reading this one.
“Monster’s are Due on Maple Street”- We read this play as a class and have so much fun acting out the parts. Then we watch The Twilight Zone episode!
Super Suspenseful Stories
"The Most Dangerous Game"- This classic is super suspenseful, and your students will love the twist in this hunting tale.
"Sound of Thunder"- a plot twist and suspense all rolled into one! Our students can not get enough of this time travel classic. You can find our lesson for this awesome story here. We like to use this short story to teach cause and effect as well as foreshadowing.
"The Veldt"- this one is creepy! The ending is sure to surprise your students!
"The Monkey’s Paw"- We wrote about this one in our blog post about scary Halloween stories. We are huge fans of The Monkey’s Paw and use an audiobook version of this tale that is just spectacular. Unfortunately, they no longer sell the version we use, but this version is pretty close. For our take on this classic tale, check out our lesson here.
"Ruthless" by William DeMille - This classic tale of revenge is always a crowd pleaser.
“The Woman in the Snow” by Patricia C. McKissack is a great ghost story with a history lesson about the Montgomery Bus Boycott built in. Your students will learn some valuable history while also following along to this spooky tale.
If you’re looking for even more scary or creepy stories that your students will love, you can check out our past blog post here. Some of the stories we mention here can also be found on that post.
Happy teaching!