Tag: writing

Teaching the Osage Indian Murders

This post describes one of the real historical mysteries discussed in our latest book, History’s Mysteries. This book includes 40 unsolved mysteries from history. Students read a text, discuss and analyze, do research on their own, and then complete a serious of projects designed to help them figure out what they think happened and why. In the process, they use critical thinking skills, academic research and writing skills, and get caught up in a fascinating story of intrigue! Read about the Osage Indian Murders and download a free unit teaching the Osage Indian Murders to try in your classroom!

The Osage Indian Murders or The Reign of Terror

One of the America’s most devastating unsolved historical mysteries involved oil, corruption, intrigue, over 100 murders and helped give birth to the FBI. And chances are you never heard a word about it, until now!

The Osage Indian tribe, like many Native American tribes had been forced off their native land and sent to a reservation, travelling the Trail of Tears to Kansas. However in due time, the US government again wanted to force the Osage off this land so they could develop the Midwest.

Coming to Oklahoma

In 1870 the tribe decided to buy dry and rocky land in Oklahoma. Their reasoning was that no one would want this land. No one would force them off of it. Life in Oklahoma was indeed hard. So it seemed an ironic, but well-deserved, blessing when oil was discovered on Osage land in 1894. The tribe decided to give headrights, the right to own and profit off the land, to all landowners. They paid a percentage of profits from the oil to everyone living on the reservation. This helped to enrich the whole tribe.

The richest people in the US

And there was quite a bit to go around! Checks given out to each member three times a year grew from $100 to $1000 ($13,000 in today’s money) to even higher as more oil was discovered and drilled. In 1923, alone it is estimated the tribe earned $30 million. That is the equivalent of $400 million today, making the members of the tribe the richest people on Earth! Unfortunately, that kind of money can bring a lot of problems.

Among other things, America was in the middle of The Great Depression, so people were envious of the Osage (But admired the Rockefellers and Gettys and white oil barons)! Under the guise of protecting the Osage, the US Congress passed a law that each Osage (50% or more of ‘native blood’) needed a court-appointed guardian. These guardians were usually white outsiders and they had total control over the money. The looting began immediately. Dozens of guardians were charged with corruption, but settled outside of court. Millions of stolen dollars were held by the guardian system and not returned!

The Reign of Terror

Then the killing started! In short order, 18 Osage and 3 outsiders were found dead, many connected to the first victim, Anna Brown. Brown’s mother had died so ownership of her estate was in limbo! At first, authorities called the deaths accidental, but it soon became clear that they were not. Local and state officials could not solve the murders or the web of fraud surrounding them! Possible the police were in on some of the corruption themselves.

So the tribe reached out to a new federal law enforcement branch, the FBI. At the time, this agency was called the Bureau of Investigations. It had little power or prestige. Their undercover operation investigating the Osage Indian murders helped put them on the map. They uncovered a web of contracted killings designed to eliminate members of the Osage and get their money! But many murders were never solved!

Can your students pick up where the FBI left off?

Download our free unit teaching the Osage Indian Murders below on Teacher Pay Teachers and try it out in the classroom!

Why use historical mysteries to teach English?

• Real historical mysteries are popular and engaging. There’s a reason that there are so many shows about them. Students are going to be motivated to read and discuss them, maybe be the one to solve the unsolved!
• When students study history, they are discussing events, using language to talk about cause and effect, order of events, pre-existing circumstances. And they are also expressing opinions and levels of certainty, all key language
• Analyzing a real unsolved mystery teaches key critical thinking, research, and analytical skills, important for academic work or civil life.

Logical Fallacies and Critical Thinking

The History’s Mysteries project is about more than just giving students topics to write about. It also teaches students the critical thinking tools they need to evaluate information and find good sources. That includes distinguishing between fact and opinion, recognizing bias, finding authoritative sources and citing those sources correctly. Critical thinking skills also includes avoiding logical fallacies in texts, as well as students’ own writing.

Our worksheet (fill out the form below to download it) identifies some of the most common logical fallacies. The worksheet discusses the fallacies, why they are illogical, and gives students practice identifying fallacies in the wild, while also picking out good logical arguments.

Here are some logical fallacies that I think are really important to understand in today’s world, and how they are often seen in the wild.

Whataboutism:

You counterattack your opponent calling them a hypocrite rather than defending your argument. The fact  that someone else did something wrong or that your opponent is not perfect does not actually make you right, however.

• You say that I broke the law? Well, were you angry when another person broke the law?
• You say you have a solution to climate change, but you drive a car which produces a lot of air pollution.

Sometimes, you’ll see a comment on an article discussing a completely unrelated topic. This draws the writer’s attention and that of future commentators away from the article and onto a topic of the commenter’s choosing.

• You’ve raised some interesting points about why the candidate I support is not perfect. But have you heard about this guy who appears to share the same beliefs as you? He’s a criminal and yet you say nothing about him in this article.

Ad Hominem

You attack the person instead of the argument, often with insults or accusations of bad behavior. However, people can have personal flaws and still produce logical arguments. Often, these days this argument takes the form of accusing the other person of bias or suggesting they have personal reasons to attack you. Neither method addresses the logic of an argument though.

• Of course, you would say I’m wrong. You subscribe to a newspaper that often disagrees with me, so you’re obviously brainwashed to hate me.
• Sure, students say they have too much homework. But they also don’t keep the bathrooms clean so I don’t see why we should believe them!

Begging the Question

You support your argument with logic that is only true if your argument is true. Notice that this isn’t the same thing as “raising a question”.

• According to my autobiography, I’m very intelligent, so it must be true. Why else would I write that?
• Exercise is the best way to stay healthy because the healthiest thing you can do is exercise.
• This movie is very popular, probably because a lot of people like it.

Slippery Slope

Arguing that something is wrong because it can lead to some extreme case or example.

• If we let these immigrants fleeing a natural disaster into our country, we have to let anyone in and soon we’ll be flooded with millions of new people, and we won’t have done background checks on any of them, and we won’t have the resources to feed and house and employ all 7 billion people on Earth!
• I have to punish you for this. Otherwise you’ll do more and more bad things and eventually end up in jail!

Strawman

You oversimplify or distort your opponents’ argument to make it easier to attack. Sometimes this is done by linking your opponent to another group. This is very common in political debates and it often overlaps with slippery slope fallacies. One of the easiest ways to make your opponent look bad is to pretend they want some kind of extreme measures.

• My opponent says he wants to increase funding for police departments. Sounds like he wants the police to be standing on every corner watching our every move.”
• The teachers want limits on how many hours they can be forced to work. But last year, university professors in the neighboring state agreed to give up overtime. So what exactly do these teachers and professors even want?”
• You say you want to buy a cat? But many people are allergic to cats, so basically you want me to stop having friends over after school!”

Don’t forget that logical fallacies often come from misguided, but sincere, attempts to discuss an issue rationally. Who among us hasn’t inadvertently cherrypicked data to support our opinions or delighted in a ad hominem attack about a public figure we don’t like? We don’t mean to, but it happens. When our flaws in logic are pointed out, we take them back and create better arguments.

Rhetorical Techniques That Use Logical Fallacies

However, sometimes it feels as if trolls and partisan actors are working to create flawed rhetorical techniques deliberately. These techniques often disguise the fallacies by cloaking them in emotional language or merging a few fallacies together. And they play on common sense intuitions that are all too human, but do not represent the best of human reason. Here are a few that I think deserve special attention, particularly when students read about “hot” topics such as gun control, voter rights, immigration, COVID-19 measures, and claims by political figures.

Magician’s Force

You could also call this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” but magician’s force sounds classier and is more classroom friendly. The name comes from a method used by stage magicians to control a magic trick while giving you the illusion of choice (well-known enough that I don’t think I’m spoiling anything. Good magicians use it without you even realizing it anyway).

Imagine that there are two cards on a table. The magician wants you to choose the card on the right. So they tell you to pick any card you want. However, if you choose the card on the left, the magician says to discard it. If you choose the card on the right, the magician says to flip it over. So you control your choice, but the magician controls the reaction.

In the rhetorical world, this fallacy works by finding fault no matter what. The criticism is often crafted into talking points and spread by partisan organizations. It’s particularly blatant when employed inconsistently.

For example:

• I like this linguist’s talks on TikTok but why does she wear so much makeup? It really detracts from her credibility. That other account is great too, but it’s hard to watch her because she always wears an old T-shirt. If you want people to take you seriously, you need to dress up a bit!
• You need to spend more time on self-care. Relax and enjoy yourself. But you also need to figure out how to be more productive so that you don’t become lazy!
• We shouldn’t get involved in this conflict. The government is wrong to send our soldiers into danger all the time. And remember I’m not a dove. I have always said we need to get involved in this other conflict. Our government is too slow to use military action to stop these dangerous forces!

Rhetorical Ignorance

Another classic logical fallacy is the appeal to ignorance, the belief that if there’s little or no evidence against you, it must be true! In the age of the Internet, appeal to ignorance is becoming not just a logical fallacy, but a sign that the person is arguing in bad faith.  I’m not saying Googling is the same as researching, weighing evidence, and coming to a well-founded conclusion. But it’s hard to say “I’ve never seen an elephant swim” or “I don’t remember your newspaper writing stories about this event” when you can look up “elephants swimming” or search the newspaper archives for stories.

And yet, you’ll often find people making false assertions, often disguised as rhetorical questions, without any acknowledgement that the truth can easily be discovered. Because the person rarely acknowledges the truth, it’s a very effective way of spreading falsehoods quickly. Note that the person often uses hedges like “I don’t think” or “I doubt” or “It’s hard to believe” so they can claim that they didn’t actually accuse anybody of anything. It’s appeal to ignorance on steroids. I haven’t seen it and I’m certainly not going to look for it!

For example:

• My opponent says he cares about veterans. But has he ever sponsored any programs or laws to help them? I doubt it.
• If this issue is so important, why hasn’t the mayor ever mentioned it in a speech? I don’t remember them every saying a word about it!

This technique works well in combination with whataboutism, calling someone a hypocrite for not doing something even if they may well have done that very thing.

• Your newspaper talks about these kinds of incidents but I’ve never seen you mention this other event, not even once!

In many cases, you see statements that the person admits are totally fictional:

• The administrators have cut the school budget again. But I’ll bet they have plenty of money for their own offices! They probably have brand new computers and leather chairs and all sort of things!

Casting Doubt

This fallacy (some call it the fallacy fallacy) says that if any part of an idea is questionable, the whole idea is wrong. It ignores the fact that no idea is beyond criticism or doubt and no action will be 100% effective. It’s an easy one to use to target large concepts and widescale policies.

For example,

• If evolution is real, why aren’t there talking apes?
• God can’t be real because there are so many different religions that disagree.
• This new program to boost test scores isn’t working because some kids are still getting low scores.

The trick is that these kinds of questions are not necessarily bad questions. People of faith have questions and doubts. Lawmakers are always looking to evaluate and improve programs they create and scientists are supposed to be asking questions and clarifying points. The fallacy is in assuming the existence of any doubt means the whole concept is invalid. Furthermore, proponents of the idea in question have usually thought of these questions before and can address them, even if they can’t solve them to everyone’s satisfaction!

Nitpicking Sealions

You may have heard of sealioning, where someone, often a troll on social media, insists on asking question after question. They allege that they are simply trying to understand your position but in fact they are trying to annoy you so that you lash out. They will then claim (ad hominem style) that because you said something mean, your position is wrong. It’s also a great way to find questions to cast doubt. Eventually, they dig down to some level where you aren’t sure of the answer or you can’t account for all the nuances.

For example,

A: You say that yoga reduces your stress?

B: Yes. I always feel more relaxed after doing yoga.

A: But how exactly does stretching your body lower stress levels?

B: Well, I don’t know exactly what the connection is.

A: Your ignorance of anatomy and organic chemistry proves that yoga doesn’t make you healthier!

Teaching Logical Fallacies

These are only a few of the logical fallacies and bad-faith rhetorical techniques used out there. I’ll consider talking about some more in the future. Regardless of the method used, we can give students skills to help them spot faulty thinking and create arguments that are valid. To bring logical fallacies into the classroom, you can:

• Download the Logical Fallacies worksheet below which identifies common logical fallacies
• Have them find real world examples of arguments and analyze them for fallacies and deceptive rhetorical devices. Examples can include: advertisements, speeches by politicians, opinion essays newspapers, even social media posts.
• Controversial takes on historical events are another great source of potential logical fallacies. Check out History’s Mysteries for examples!
• Students can peer edit each other’s essays and look for fallacies, then suggest how to fix them.
• Have students write logically fallacious statements or paragraphs and then fix them.
• Check out more resources including flashcards and classroom posters at https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/.
• Enjoy these logical fallacy referee memes to employ on social media or use as flash cards: https://imgur.com/a/QDbyt/all.

Writing Outside the Box: Building Students’ Creativity

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students tell me that they don’t know how to be creative. They think creativity is a talent that you are born with or not. While it’s true that some people seem to be better at creativity than others, I really think being creative is more of a skill that can be practiced and honed. And not all our students need to be super creative all the time. However, creative thinking is a great life skill that helps with problem-solving. And in writing, even academic or professional writing, being able to come up with lots of different ideas is important. A creative person can communicate more effectively by being able to vary how the express themselves. What should we be doing to ensure we are building students‘ creativity?

The easiest way to help students be creative is to give them practice. And the best way to come up with good creative ideas is to come up with lots and lots of ideas. Many of those ideas will not be good. Creativity is really a percentage game.

So building students’ creativity is more about getting students to do the work and not putting obstacles in their way. That means doing lots of writing. It also means creating a classroom environment that is low-stress, experimentation-friendly, and failure-tolerant! There’s a time and a place for correcting students and doing more guided work, but generating ideas is not one of them.

Developing creativity also means avoiding prompts that can actually limit or stifle creativity. What characteristics do prompts that may limit creativity have? While every person and what inspires them is different, here are some of the things to look out for.

Limiting Student Creativity

1. Repetitiveness: Teachers and materials writers (myself included) sometimes forget that students do more than one activity. How many times in a term are they asked their favorite color? Or a book they really like? Or even something like the kinds of things you can do in the summer. A story prompt like this might take the form of “You win a million dollars” or “You become President”. These questions may be fine for other reasons like a fluency practice, eliciting vocab, or practicing a grammar structure. However, the same old prompts can fall flat if you are trying to get students to be creative and come up with new ideas!
   Note that younger learners may not mind this repetition, or may even like it. Most first-graders LOVE to tell you their favorite color, dinosaur, TV show, friend, food, and chair in the house. And their taste tends to change faster too!
2. Limited Answers A lot of prompts and discussion questions really only have one answer. Take a question like, “Do you think protecting the environment is important?” Who is going to say no? Even something like, “Think of 3 reasons why protecting the environment is important,” is fairly limited.
   Take a minute and think. I’ll bet you said: Save the animals, keep the air and water clean, preserve the planet for future generations. Or a variation on those three points.
3. Expected Answers: In the same vein, a lot of our prompts have fairly predictable answers. If you do ask a student about saving the environment, and they answer that environmentalism is over-rated, or that the environment should be preserved for economic reasons, do you gently guide students back to the “right” answer? Or do your materials have leading questions that push them in one direction? If you give students a story about a conflict between friends, do you encourage them, intentionally or unintentionally, explicitly or implicitly, to write a happy ending where everyone gets along?
   There is a time and a place for the predictable or expected. We should always allow students to write their true opinion, but it’s hard to be creative if students feel that one outcome is preferred or dispreferred.
4. Too Open: On the other side, there’s the prompt that is too open or too out there and unpredictable. Some people think that being creative means getting really out there and surreal and random. “Write a story about a pencil eraser and a green squid with a mohawk” might inspire some, but many of us might struggle to put those things together, and come up with a reason why a squid has a mohawk. And it’s interesting that some modern children’s books that feature these kinds of wacky characters end up with fairly mundane framings. “Hi I’m Mr. Mohwak, the squid with a mohawk! Are you an eraser?” “Yeah, but I live in the ocean.” “Weird! Let’s get ice cream!”
   I think there’s a time and place for these kinds of “be totally random” exercises, but it doesn’t always lead to productive creativity so much as randomness for the sake of being random.

So what does make a good prompt for building students’ creativity?

With the same caveat as above, that everyone is different and that there’s a time and a place for everything, good creative prompts are open enough to push students in a few different directions besides the obvious. A haunted house story holds open the possibility that the house really is haunted or that it’s a criminal hideout, or just a hoax.

Students also need support to fall back on. “Imagine you are a broom in Buckingham Palace” is pretty open and creative, but students may have a hard time imagining that. They know little about Buckingham Palace and the role of a broom can be pretty limited. Support can take the form of guiding questions such as, “What’s the weirdest thing you have to clean up?” or a longer story starter such as:

Now we have a plot and a location, but there’s still plenty left to the students’ imagination.

Finally, there should be no obvious direction the story has to go in. Sometimes this is implemented in the class. As a teacher, you can make it clear that students can write unexpected things. You can even do an opposite activity, where students have to write the opposite of what they naturally would, or twist the starter around. A romantic prompt turns into a thriller. A funny story starter turns into drama and so on.

Often the easiest way to help students be more creative and less likely to follow the obvious path is to design prompts that are outside the box! Instead of asking why nature is good, ask what would happen if we woke up to find all the trees dead. Or we lived in a world where recycling was illegal. Or make the prompt specific. Focus on a particular region or even species.

I hope this has given you something to think about when it comes to creative writing and building students’ creativity! Feel free to share your own creative prompts in the comments!

If you’re looking for some sample prompt ideas that are a bit outside the box, check out our books:

• Stories Without End
• Outside the Box
• What Would You Do?

We also have individual downloadable, printable resources on Teachers Pay Teachers.

How to do Social-Emotional Learning Prompts for ESL

Sometimes the best classroom activities come out of the simplest things. Case in point, these Social-Emotional Learning prompts for ESL students created by Teresa X. Nguyen and illustrated by Tyler Hoang and Nathaniel Cayanan. Each worksheet has a written prompt and an original hand-drawn illustration. It’s simple enough but designed to work for students at any level. It’s a particularly powerful tool, as there are plenty of social-emotional learning activities and prompts for the mainstream classroom.

But what’s unique about these worksheets is that they’re the only social-emotional learning prompts for ESL students and the ESL classroom! Because they’re so simple and there’s so much space on the page, students can respond by drawing, writing, jotting down words and notes, or discussing. You can even scaffold, moving from sketches and single words all the way to a longer piece of writing.

Because these positive activity prompts  are so much fun, I couldn’t sharing some of my own ideas for filling them out. I’ve also included some ways to implement them in the classroom! Links to the worksheets on Teachers Pay Teachers are in the captions or check out all our printable, downloadable, or shareable Positive Activities.

I’ll start with my favorite!

New Emotions or Emojis

Students draw expressions to represent new feelings or attitudes and then share their creations with the class. They can get other students to guess their emotions from the drawings or share one emoji they want, or even an emotion they think needs a name! Like that feeling when you’re physically tired but emotionally not ready for bed!

Here’s a list of a few ways students can respond to the Social Emotional Learning prompts, depending on their language level and the logistics of the class. I’ve put the activities in roughly order of complexity. However, what works for your classroom and what is easier or harder for your students may also vary! You can even scaffold the activities and have students start anywhere on the list, then work their way up. Go from a sketch to a short writing in a few simple moves!

1. Sketch an response.
2. Label the drawing with key words.
3. Discuss your response with a partner.
4. Write short phrases or sentences as a response.
5. Brainstorm ideas with a partner or in a group.
6. Outline a longer response, using a graphic organizer or writing frame.
7. Discuss the prompt in detail with a partner.
8. Write a paragraph or series of paragraphs.
9. Share written answers and provide peer feedback

#Thankful Prompt

I love this thankful prompt because it really tells you what your students value in others. What do they love about the people in their lives? They may want to name these people, but they don’t have to. This is a great discussion prompt as students can share about one particular person in their lives.

A Selfie

This is a fun getting-to-know-you activity that can be done in a lot of different ways. Students can draw themselves realistically or how they want to appear. They can label the drawing with facts about themselves, the clothes they like to wear, how they feel about their appearance (like their favorite part of themselves). They can draw themselves doing something they love or wearing their favorite clothes or sitting in their favorite place. What do they want to share about themselves? Extend this activity by making a gallery of classmates for everyone to get to know everyone else. Have them do one at the beginning of the term and at the end so they can compare their portraits.

My Robot Social-Emotional ESL Prompt

This prompt is a lot of fun for young learners. They’re probably making their own robots anyway and the activity can give them a lot of vocabulary. Students can learn words for describing machines and electronics including button, gear, switch, click, and more! They can also learn words for the functions their robot performs.

They could focus on a problem and have their robot be a solution to that problem, which helps build vocabulary in a particular area. Or just have them go crazy designing the coolest robot they can think of and labelling all the features. Then they can share with a partner or with the whole class.

You may ask how to use this as a social-emotional learning prompt specifically. Students can design robots to help with social or emotional life issues-a companion robot, a therapist bot, a tool to help with special needs. Your students’ imagination is the limit.

My Rhyming Poem: Writing Prompt for SEL 

There are a lot of ways to get students writing short rhyming poems. They can read and copy rhyming poems, including formulaic ones such as limericks or “Roses are red, violets are blue” poems. They can sing rhyming songs and copy the structure. You can even have them imitate a picture book. Let them enjoy flipping through a rhyming dictionary for ideas.

Looking for a whole book of these? Check out the paperback of 60 Positive Activities for Kids, for sale wherever books are sold! We also have them in slide format to make them easy to share in-person or online!

And feel free to share your ideas for using these wonderful creations in the classroom!

Get Students Writing and Talking!

As more and more teachers are turning to online teaching and distance learning for the forseeable future, and students may be considering self-study options, I’d like to introduce our free prompt generating tool, English Prompts, with three different kinds of prompts: creative writing, speaking, and role-plays.

The first, Stories Without End, generates a random short story prompt that ends on a cliff-hanger. The genres vary from horror to comedy to sci-fi to realistic fiction, so there’s a broad range of topics. Don’t like the story? Click “New Story”! Here are some ideas to use it with students:

• Have students work as a group to brainstorm story ending ideas, then write a joint story.
• As a class, come up with a list of 5-10 questions they think the story ending should address. Then students can individually pick 2-3 questions to guide their story ending.
• Students can also generate and answer questions as a group.
• Have students each write an ending, then share them anonymously. Students read the other endings and vote on the best one.
• Have students write another paragraph and then swap papers. They then write another paragraph that follows from what the previous student wrote. The second student can end the story or students can swap again and keep adding paragraphs till they reach a logical conclusion.
• Got lower level students? They can read or tell their story idea rather than writing it. You can even have them draw a picture or storyboard their idea, then label or write an outline, and then tell it.

Next, What Would You Do? prompts are a collection of hypothetical situations that students answer by telling what they would do in those situations. Some are realistic, some are ridiculous, and some are somewhere in-between. Get a new random situation by clicking “There are a lot of ways to use this flexible resource:

• Think of contextual questions that might change students’ answers. Would you return a stolen wallet full of cash? What if you were homeless and needed the money? What if you saw the person who dropped it?
• Or have students think of contexts where they would do different actions.
• Have a debate where students argue the pluses and minuses of different situations.
• Have students use them as story prompts to write a short story highlighting the situation and their chosen response.
• Ask students to predict what their classmates would do in different situations, then do a survey.
• Have students interview friends or family members or put a poll online and then tally up the results and report on what they learned.
• Get students to come up with their own WWYD?s.
• Watch the show What Would You Do? on ABC (episodes can be found on Youtube) and get them to predict what people would do or discuss how people did react and why.

Looking to do some acting? Start a Scene is an improv or role-play prompt generator. Click “New Line” and get a first line of a dramatic scene. Students can use that to improvise or write a conversation or situation. To make it even more useful, you can also click on the “New Emotion” button and get an emotion to say the line with. This helps draw students’ attention to the way that we use our voices and bodies to show feeling or attitude. It also helps students think about pragmatics. We speak differently to angry people than happy people. If someone says something ironically, we react in a whole other way!Use these prompts to:

• Generate an improv or role-play, written or spoken.
• Ask students to practice saying a line with an emotion while others guess and/or discuss how well the actor did.
• Try the same line with different emotions and talk about how the meaning changes with the attitude.
• Describe the situation. Who is speaking? To whom? Where are they? What do they want?
• Assign inappropriate emotions to lines. Have someone say, “I love you” as if they have the giggles, for example!

Hope you enjoy this tool and we’re always open to hearing what kinds of new features you’d like to see! You can also

browse all our free resources for doing drama in the classroom at Plays and Drama Resources for Students. 

Stories Without End in the Classroom

I was recently uploading more individual stories without end (from Taylor’s wonderful book) to Teachers Pay Teachers. One of the pieces of information you need to fill out there is how long the material will take to use. Well, the stories are designed to be adaptable so they can be used in one class period, or stretched out over several periods. There are a lot of ways to use Stories Without End in the classroom.

Obviously timing depends on the length of the story as well as the level of your learners, and how fast they read. In addition, there are a number of extension activities that you can choose to use or not. How you approach the vocabulary preview and the before you read question will also affect timing.

However, we’ve found teachers do fall into some standard patterns. There seem to be three ways to use Stories Without End in the classroom. But there are a few things every teacher should be doing:

• Have students keep a vocabulary notebook so they retain the new vocab they are exposed to.
• Give students all the time and support they need to read and comprehend the story.
• Align the time you given them writing with your expectations. If you’re using this as a filler activity, students can write a story in class, then revise for homework. On the other hand, if you want students to produce a polished story that will weigh into their grade significantly, they will need more time, the opportunity to write multiple drafts, and chances to get class and teacher feedback.

One Session

1. Some teachers do them in one 45-60 minute class period. This works best with the Short Takes (all of which are now up on our Teachers Pay Teachers Store). Students can go through the preview questions and the vocabulary as a class or in small groups.

Then have them move on to the story itself. Let them read individually and go around the room, as you provide support to anyone who needs it.
Let them thinking about the After you Read discussion questions, then go over them in groups or pairs. Finally, have them draft their ending with remaining class time to finish for homework.

This way is quick and doesn’t allow for much reflecting or editing, and it may be hard to fit in the extension activities. However, students get the benefits of reading and the practice in creative writing. You may want to use this quick method to generate a few drafts, then have students pick their best work to go back and revise for a final submission.

2-3 Sessions

2. If you want to do the stories in 2-3 days, here’s a great way to do it!
Assign the Before you Read questions and the vocabulary for homework the night before. That way, students come in prepared to read.

In class, discuss the Before you Read questions. You can have students share their prepared answers in pairs or groups, go over them as a full-class, or have them interview each other and analyze the answers. Some questions even lend themselves to a short debate!

Ensure students are set on the vocabulary, and then have students read the stories in reading groups. That way, they can support each other’s comprehension. As class time permits, tackle the After You Read questions. For homework at the end of day one, have them draft an ending.

For day two, plan a writer’s workshop where students continue to work on their endings, revise them, provide peer feedback (and perhaps get feedback from you as well). You may want to continue working with the After You Read questions or tackle one of the other projects as well, depending on your time constraints.

Longer Term

3. Finally, it’s possible to stretch the book out and make it part of a longer lesson plan. To start with, for homework have students interview friends, family, host-families, or even the public about the Before You Read questions.

On the first day of class, students can discuss or debate the various opinions and ideas they’ve been exposed to. This can lead to a very deep reflection on the themes of the story and help students write a deeper ending when the time comes.

Another advantage of stretching out the activity is that you can spend some time doing vocabulary work. One of my favorite ways to teach new vocabulary is to have students work on the words in pairs, then use context sentences to guess the meanings, before going over them as a class. I then go on to give them a few activities in word-recognition. (You can purchase a whole vocabulary lesson plan framework here). You can then have students read the story in reading groups, as time permits. For homework, let them re-read the story individually.

On day 2, take time to address any questions or problems students have with comprehension. This might be a good time to cover any common mistakes with vocabulary or general misunderstandings about the story that you’ve been hearing.

Then have then look at the After You Read questions in pairs. Go over them as a class, or have students form new pairs/groups or two pairs, to discuss the questions. Students should be more than ready to come up with their own endings at this point. However, if you have the time, I love to introduce students to collective writing techniques.
In groups, students can do any or all of the following:

• brainstorm ideas together
• workshop each other’s ideas, giving advice and constructive criticism
• plot a group story, with everyone adding in their own ideas (a variation of Yes, And)
• Actually create a story as a group, orally or in written form.
• Do a story-writing game such as Exquisite Corpse.

Then for homework, students can pursue their own individual ideas, taking the best of the ideas they came up with in a group. Have students outline or write a draft to bring in on day three.

On day three, students can continue to work on their drafts, workshopping what they have written with a peer group and in a writing conference with you, the teacher. By the end of the day, students should have an excellent first draft which you can then take and provide detailed critiques of.

When students get their draft back (we’ll call this day four although it may not be consecutive), students can revise and produce a draft for homework. During class time, take on one of the extension projects such as dramatizing the story or writing a detailed summary. These make for excellent group projects that can fill a class session and be finalized for homework.

If you really want to extend the lesson out, when students have gotten their final drafts of their endings back, let them dramatize or videotape their completed stories. You may want to have students do this in groups, in which case they will have to choose whose ending to work with. So think about grouping students who wrote similar conclusions. To do a good job, dramatizing a script will take

• a planning period where students outline their drama (supplements provided in the back of the book)
• A script-writing period (or enough rehearsal time to be able to memorize their lines)
• A rehearsal period
• A performance period, where students perform for each other and/or videotape their creations.
• Evaluation, where they get feedback on their performances.

How do You Use Stories Without End in the classroom? Leave a comment or contact us and let us know!

For more posts about using Stories Without End in the classroom, check out:

• A detailed guide to Stories Without End
• Creative Writing Class with Stories Without End

And check out Stories Without End, as well as Taylor’s other innovative book, What Would You Do?