The Tell-Tale Heart Activity Bundle

This resource features a bundle of all of our lesson plans, materials, and activities for Edgar Allan Poe's gruesome tale, The Tell-Tale Heart. Each product is thoughtfully crafted and allows students to think outside the box by delving deeply into the story's themes, characters, vocabulary, and plot development. Lessons have all been classroom-tested and allow for differentiation while encouraging optimal student engagement. This activity bundle provides more than a week's worth of material to bring the story to life!

Included in this Bundle:

• The Tell-Tale Heart Literature Guide: This product features a comprehensive literature guide for use while reading Edgar Allan Poe's gruesome tale, The Tell-Tale Heart. The activity bundle provides an excellent basis for comprehension and vocabulary acquisition for the short story and encourages students to think critically about plot structure, literary elements, perspective, and figurative language within the story. With newly added material like the Snap Chat graphic organizer and Figurative Language Challenge, the wide range of activities in this guide will keep your students engaged and help them to delve into the mind of one of the most notorious unreliable narrators of all time.

• The Tell-Tale Heart Anticipation Guide and Lesson Plan: This resource features an anticipation guide for Edgar Allan Poe's chilling tale of murder and mutilation, The Tell-Tale Heart, and a meticulously-explained lesson plan that I believe is the absolute best way to approach a new story. Using a non-intimidating method called "Numbered Heads", this activity will get your students thinking, writing, conversing, and reporting about themes you will be encountering during your study of The Tell-Tale Heart and your overall Poe unit. This lesson is particularly useful for Poe's tale which can be difficult for students to understand at first, thus going in with knowledge of themes will help them connect. I am confident that your students will enjoy this thoughtful, engaging activity and beg you to begin reading one of the most notoriously gruesome stories in American literature.

• Unreliable Narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart Lesson Plan: This resource features a full-length lesson plan, accompanying materials, and creative writing assignment that asks students to delve into the crazed mind of the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. Through an engaging "True/Untrue Storytelling" activity, precise mini-lecture on the unreliable narrator, guiding questions, and follow-up assignment, your students will be able to understand the sometimes daunting concept of the unreliable narrator and discuss how a story is affected when told through the eyes of one. This lesson plan opens up a new world for students as they realize that many of the books, movies, and tv shows that they have read or seen in the past may have been influenced by an unreliable narrator. Thus, not only is this lesson important, it is intrinsically fascinating to students and the "oohs" and "aha" moments that tend to arise from the discussion make it a blast to teach! I am confident that you and your students will love this lesson as much as mine have for years.

• The Tell-Tale Heart Creative Writing Assignment on Perspective (also included within Literature Guide): This engaging assignment asks students to think critically about the events detailed by an unreliable narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Did the old man truly have no inkling of the narrator's hatred of him? Did the police officers really "chat pleasantly" as they interrogated the increasingly agitated man? In the assignment, students must consider these questions and more, then write a short narrative through the perspective of either the old man or a police officer at the scene. The assignment is fun but more importantly, it leads to sophisticated discussion about the concept of an unreliable narrator. This is a perfect supplement for any unit on Edgar Allan Poe!

• The Tell-Tale Heart Socratic Seminar Materials: A Socratic Seminar (or a "Fish Bowl" Conversation as I like to call them with my students) is a higher order way of assessing whether your students are able to understand and react to your class texts. These seminars rely on the power of inquiry and allow students to take the lead in their learning and discussion. The only problem? They require a great deal of preparation. Fortunately, this student-tested resource includes everything you need to conduct a structured and formal set of Socratic Seminars in your classroom surrounding the short stories, The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe... with very little preparation required on your end.

• The Tell-Tale Heart ESCAPE ROOM: This meticulously-crafted resource features all of the materials you need to conduct a full-length Escape Room for The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. Planning an escape room may seem like quite the daunting task (and it is!), but this product provides everything from the basics and set-up instructions to signs and answer keys so that yours runs smoothly from start to finish. The activity involves movement, energy, creative thinking and most of all, collaboration. It is the perfect activity for Halloween or any day you want to shake it up with your students without sacrificing learning. Your students will be having so much fun that they won’t even realize the higher order thinking skills they are applying in the playing of this game.

• The Tell-Tale Heart Human Tic Tac Toe Review Game: This resource features a lesson plan and materials for the Human Tic Tac Toe Review Game, an engaging and competitive way to review Edgar Allan Poe's chilling tale of cold-blooded murder, The Tell-Tale Heart. Let's face it, review days can be boring for both teachers and students, so liven them up with this collaborative game. The resource includes not only a meticulously detailed lesson plan and set-up instructions, but over 40 questions on plot, literary elements, vocabulary, and figurative language from The Tell-Tale Heart, as well as questions about Poe himself. Besides simple set-up, very little preparation is needed for this lesson and if your students are like mine, they will ask for this form of review for every unit of study.

• The Tell-Tale Heart Figurative Language Challenge Activity (also included within Literature Guide): I created this "Figurative Language Challenge" activity and lesson plan several years ago for my middle school students as they were studying Poe's chilling story of murder and mutilation, The Tell-Tale Heart. Little did I know that it would become the most requested game among my students of all time. This resource includes a meticulously-detailed lesson plan using warm-up, explanation, application, and synthesis, and a one-of-a-kind game that will get your students excited about identifying the copious amount of figurative language that pervades the text. This is the perfect lesson plan for a Friday, on Halloween, or any time you need to amp up the energy in your classroom without sacrificing learning... and of course, it is Common Core aligned!

**BONUS FILE: Intro to Edgar Allan Poe PowerPoint: This product features a highly-engaging introductory PowerPoint Presentation for the Father of Horror himself, Edgar Allan Poe. A unit of study on Poe is not complete without learning the gory and heartbreaking details of his life and what made him into the master poet and writer whom we continue to marvel at today. This 20-slide powerpoint runs through his tragic family life and childhood, relationships, early occupations (before he was the Poe that you know), synopses of some of his most famous works, death theories, and current pop culture references. It concludes with a 10 question quiz to see how well students listened... and trust me, they will be hanging on your every word! This powerpoint encourages class participation, is fully editable to suit your class' needs, and lasts about 30-40 minutes to run through. I suggest presenting this on the very first day of your unit on Edgar Allan Poe. Enjoy and let the horror begin!

_________________________________________________________________________________

Click to Follow Language Arts Excellence