Zora Neale Hurston Short Stories & Essay | Sweat, Spunk, How It Feels to Be...

Looking for powerful and engaging units on one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century?

Zora Neale Hurston’s work is popular for a reason—her writing is both challenging and accessible, her themes are both universal and unique to time and place, and her literary voice is like no other. The units in this bundle will make her work come alive for your classes.

Focusing on three short stories and one essay, these innovative units will help your classes to fully appreciate this masterful writer. Every unit includes close reading questions, pre-reading exercises, and plenty of activities for reading and writing. Together with your students, you’ll also explore recordings of spirituals and Hurston’s own research into the music of the south, you’ll discuss a TED Talk and an opinion article on why we gossip, you’ll move through the steps of a close reading of a literary passage, and you’ll analyze and unpack Hurston’s masterful writing with the structured activities and handouts.

The variety of materials, real-life connections, and innovative approaches to the information will keep students engaged and excited about learning. Additionally, the concrete text-based questions and unique sources discourage cheating and encourage students to answer for themselves.

When you teach Zora Neale Hurston’s work with these engaging units you will:

• Start your classes off with bellringer freewrite prompts that will help them to focus, get ready to work, and begin to explore the essential questions of the texts.

• Give your students some focused practice reading Hurston’s potentially challenging dialects with quick, no-prep warm-up activities.

• Empower different learning styles with creative exercises, group work, dynamic discussion questions, and ideas for interactive notebooks.

• Easily differentiate for standard, honors, or AP classes with the detailed plans and suggestions for pacing.

• Successfully take your students through their analysis of the texts with close reading and discussion questions which are designed with enough scaffolding to help struggling students but also with enough rigor for more advanced classes.

• Strengthen your students’ close reading skills by taking them through the process of a close reading of a literary text using my time-tested methods and explanations.

• Help your students to fully appreciate Hurston’s writing and to experiment with their own writing with proven creative writing activities focusing on setting, dialogue, point of view, and characterization.

• Easily discuss the close reading passages, close reading questions, and discussion questions using the extensive answer key.

Ultimately, the engaging discussions that you conduct with your classes will help them to clarify their own views on important topics and will help you get to know your students on a deeper level.

There are no lectures or power points here—students will do the work themselves, with guidance from their teacher. Rather than telling them what the texts mean, you will be empowering them with the confidence and skills to tackle challenging texts on their own.