Authentic Writing Experience for October - Writing Scary Stories

 

In celebration of the release of my new book, The Raven Remix: A Mashup of Poe Titles, coming October 15, this month's Authentic Writing Experience is about Scary Stories, and it's just in time for Halloween. We all love scary stories - if they're not too scary. They are great for sitting around a campfire or making a cold winter night more interesting. All cultures have scary stories. Scary stories help us face our fears. They give us a way to deal with difficult concepts like death.
Did you know that Frankenstein was created by Mary Shelley when she was 18 years old on a rainy afternoon when she and her husband, Percy Shelley, and their friend, Lord Byron, were trapped indoors? They didn't have Netflix or cable TV, so they spent their time writing ghost stories and sharing them with each other. Would you like some real-life inspiration for a scary story? Watch the video on the HISTORY website that tells how Mary Shelley carried around her husband's heart after he died.
Or maybe your students would get inspired from reading about the many theories on the death of Edgar Allan Poe. It is a mystery that has never been solved. I explore several theories in the background section of The Raven Remix. This month I will be sharing some of them here on my blog so check back soon! Poe is considered by many to be the father of American Gothic Horror. Elements of several of his stories appear in The Raven Remix.  He faced much death and tragedy in his life, and it clearly inspired his writing.
Many of my students have difficulty constructing basic sentences and paragraphs. Writing can be intimidating. For that reason, I'm including a fun fill-in-the-blank story starter for this month's AWE activity.  I included a mini word matrix for the base element SPECT (as in specter). There are a series of questions to help students build a complex sentence. To learn more about using the matrix for Structured Word Inquiry and morphology instruction, see my blog post HERE. Find the downloadable PDF for the sentence/story starter HERE. It includes the three pages seen below.

And don't forget to check out The Raven Remix. The five animals on the cover all come from stories by Poe.

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