Horror, Suspense and Edgar Allen Poe

This is one of my favorite times of the year to teach literature! We're starting our horror and suspense unit. The Tell Tale Heart is a traditional 8th grade story. It's creepy and weird, but in a very good way. However, it's also a challenging read with some very unusual vocabulary--partly because it was written 150 years ago and partly because the narrator is insane! We used Padlet to make a plot diagram of the story and we focused on find the tone and mood created by the author. We are also working to continue adding explanations to our answers and discussions. 

Non Fiction Biographies

Next week we will begin to focus on one of our compare and contrast standards while we watch a movie version of the story. We'll discuss how the story is similar to the movie, but we'll also focus on what changes the director made. Those changes are important because the impact how we feel tone and mood. We'll transition into a few non fiction pieces that focus on the life of Poe and we'll read at least one of his poems, Annabel Lee. We'll look for common themes between the two fiction pieces, and we'll also continue to focus on our two essential questions for this unit. 1. How do authors build suspense in their writing? 2. How does an author's experiences impact their writing? 

Reflection

We continued our weekly reflections, although we changed things up a little in week 3. We used Flipgrid to record our reflections instead of writing. This lets us practice organizing our thoughts before we speak, the same way we should organize our thoughts before we write. You can watch my intro video for the week below.