Short Stories
The Most Dangerous Game
The Necklace
Ninth-grade students begin their year in English Language Arts with a four-week short story unit designed to teach, review, and reinforce essential elements of fiction as well as critical reading strategies. All students will read Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” in addition to a selection of other high-interest short stories. During the unit, students will write focused, well-developed, single-paragraph responses to questions asking them to analyze elements such as mood, character, and theme. There is a special focus on supporting their claims with specific text evidence.
For the unit’s performance task, students will take a test that includes independently reading a short story and writing a well-developed paragraph with supporting evidence and analysis in response to a given prompt.
Essential Questions
Q1: How does an author’s writing style affect the meaning of a story?
Q2: In what way do stories and storytelling help us better understand the human condition?
Q3: What does it look like to write a well-formed analytical paragraph?
Useful Links
"The Most Dangerous Game"
"The Necklace"
"The Landlady"
Focus Standards
RL 9-10 1. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text
RL 9-10 2. Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
W 9-10 2. Write informative/explanatory texts (e.g., essays, oral reports, biographical feature articles) to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.