I’m a bit of a grinch about giving up instructional time — apologies for the jump in holidays with the use of grinch. My way of giving in to students’ enthusiasm is to double-down with the amount of care they have to put into their word-choice and form. That’s why, my go-to lesson for a few years has been 2-sentence scary stories.
Here’s how I run the lesson:
First, we read a few examples together. I DO NOT just send students Googling around the interwebs. A Google Image search for 2-sentence scary stories will call up a lot of options. And a lot of those options are likely to be not-school-appropriate. See the content guidelines I set with students, below.
Next, we read some options without images. Here are a few that I use:
I heard the doorbell ring, so I went downstairs to answer it. That was when I realized the doorbell was ringing in the attic.
After hearing a strange noise in the hallway late at night, I crept out of bed and shined my flashlight in the direction I heard it from. I heard the noise again, from another direction, but before I could move my flashlight, the battery died.
Thunder and lightning rumbled through the house and lit up my room. I wasn’t alone.
At that point, I ask students to explain the form to me. (Boom! Deep thinking about form!) Inevitably, they come up with:
The first sentence describes something pretty normal, but that ‘normal’ thing is usually something that causes shivers in the right setting, like a doorbell ringing, late-night noises, or thunder and lightning.
The second sentence gives the first sentence a twist.
I also ask them to tell me what they notice about word-choice. They usually point out that sentences are generally short, often written in first-person, and describe something in the environment. (Boom! Deep thinking about brevity and description!)
Then, we look at a few that are placed on image cards. Here’s a link to a slide show that you can feel free to download and use. The students talk about what the images do for the text, and what the text does for the images (my favorite one to talk about is the one with the kittens where the student made kittens TERRIFYING). Usually, students notice that it takes the image and the words working together to make the 2-sentence scary story really work. (Boom! Deep thinking about multimodality!)
Next, we talk about content guidelines. Some of my guidelines are general kindness & school-appropriateness rules: Slasher-stories are a non-starter for me. Stories that place someone else in the room as the main character — totally off-limits. We also talk about what sorts of topics give the shivers. Often, the list of possibilities includes: dolls, strange noises, weather, darkness, surprising things in the dark, weird sounds, getting trapped, sharks. All of those topics make great scary stories that don’t resort to gore. (Boom! Deep thinking about topic and audience!)
Finally, we all start working on a collaborative document. Again - you can download and use the slide show I started. For some technical details: I make enough blank slides for every student in the class, and I have them claim a slide by writing their name in the presenter notes. If they make more than one, they add a new slide. We get our pictures from Pixabay, and have a quick conversation about attributions because most of the images on Pixabay don’t require one. (Boom! Deep thinking about copyright!)
I have everyone work on the same document at the same time to reinforce that this is playful writing. I write along with them Students are invited to create as many stories as they can within an allotted amount of time. I note that not every story they create will be AMAZING and that it’s more about trying out the form than it is about writing a perfect story. Interestingly, the number of amazing stories is actually usually pretty high. As they create, they talk to each other - I’ll hear shouts of, “Slide 18 is awesome! Who did that one?” or, “Shudder! Who makes kittens evil!” or, “I need an idea for a picture with a book.” (Boom! Peer review!)
At the end of the process, we look through the slide show of images. If someone reads theirs and says they don’t like it, I’ll nudge a little, asking how they might change it if they were to do it again. (Boom! Revision!)
Then, I ask students to let me know if they want me to post the stories online (with or without first names). They’ll write their permission in the speaker notes for their slide. Each slide can be downloaded as a jpg, which makes them easier to post in a Tweet, on Instagram, or on a class blog. (Boom! Publishing!)
Then, I send students off to their next class, confident in the fact that I still made them write today.
If you use any of the ideas in this lesson, let me know! I’d love to know what works for you.
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