Tales from Room 801

There are so many fun activities that you can do with your students for Halloween and still teach your required curriculum.  Below you will find several activities to use whether you are teaching fiction, nonfiction, or poetry in your classroom. Teaching Fiction Middle school students love a good scary story.  Halloween is a great time to pull out all your old favorites, The Tell Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, etc. A few lesser known scary stories that I love to read in my classroom are "The Coughing Dog" and "The White Dress."  Both of the stories are very short, easy to read and highly engaging. The White Dress "The White Dress" tells the story of a girl that needs a dress for an upcoming school dance, but she can't afford one.  While at a funeral, she notices a beautiful dress on a girl in a casket.  She decides to steal the dress and wear it to the dance.  Turns out the dress is cursed and one thing leads to another... The sto...

During the past few years, I am embarrassed to say that my students have read very few books.  We have really focused on short stories and story excerpts.  Because of our previous focus, I feel that my love of reading hasn't really been shown to my students.  One of the goals I have for my students this year is to read more actual books.  My partner teacher and I decided that this year, our students were going to read at least 3 books in class.  This may not seem like much to some English teachers, but for us, this will be a huge shift in our teaching.  To accomplish this goal, we are planning to implement reading workshop at least twice a week.   So this week was our first week at school.  We knew that to be able to implement this shift we needed to start right away.  (If not, it's too easy to go back to our usual ways of teaching.)  So we decided to start on Friday of the first week.   Getting Started ...