Short Story Ideas for Secondary ELA Students

When teaching our middle school students, we know that student engagement is of utmost importance. Using short stories is a great way to teach many of the literature standards in a fun and interactive way. Owlcation has some great short story ideas for middle and high school students, as does We Are Teachers. Analyzing short stories in class has so many benefits and covers a plethora of Common Core State Standards to boot. There are really no downsides to adding highly engaging and high quality short stories into your curriculum. Not only do they support literary response and analysis practice, they also help students learn how to analyze a short story in an essay format, both of which are highly tested skills on state exams. Aside from state testing and common core state standards, analyzing short stories is just good teaching. If you are searching for some highly engaging, crowd pleasing stories that won’t make you drop dead from boredom, look no further, teacher friends! The Teaching Distillery has got you covered. For over a decade we have been using short stories in our classes and creating literary response and analysis lessons that help students learn the various elements of fiction in a fun and interactive way. We are quite partial to the creepy and macabre, as evidenced by the short story analysis lessons we have available at our Teacher Pay Teacher store. These short stories include The Lottery, Lamb to the Slaughter, and The Monkey’s Paw. We also love a story with a great plot twist, like Teacher Tamer, Why I Hit My Boyfriend, and The Truth Abut Sharks. We have yet to disappoint any of our students. In our classes, when they hear that we are about to read a short story, they literally cheer in anticipation. They know we know good story telling, and we have yet to disappoint our young judges.

So, what are some of your favorite short stories that you like to teach in class? If you end up trying out one of our short story analysis lessons, please let us know how it went! Comment below or leave us a review on our Teacher Pay Teacher Store. We encourage feedback.

Bottoms up!