Sunday, April 26, 2009

Final Project: What Makes a Scary Story?

PURPOSES

My final project will be a teaching unit that explores the question "What makes a scary story?" It will be geared toward 7th and 8th grade students and it will use Edgar Allan Poe stories as its anchor texts. I plan to bring in scary movies, shows and books from popular culture, including parodies, to break down which elements make a story scary. The unit will lead up to a project in which students will write their own scary stories.

My goal with this unit is to do a genre study. I have seen Edgar Allan Poe units taught before as an author study, and I find the approach to be very ineffective. Asking students to find links between Poe’s life and his writing is very limiting and does not allow students to explore an essential question or create their own work. Instead, I would like students to look at Poe's stories (as well as other scary stories, films and television programs) and study the craft of writing a scary story and apply the techniques to their own writing.

The challenge I anticipate is creating a unit about scary stories that is not too frightening for 7th and 8th grade students. I will try to find ways to incorporate media in ways that teach the genre while still making my students feel safe.

LESSONS

1. Anticipatory Guide and Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe

The class will begin the unit by taking inventory of their ideas and opinions about scary stories by using an anticipation guide. It will be some version of this anticipation guide, which I borrowed from the ReadWriteThink website:

http://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson407/anticipation.pdf

After completing the anticipation guide, the class will watch a clip from "The Simpsons" (Season 2, Episode 3) which is a take on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." It features an excellent dramatic reading by James Earl Jones and Homer Simpson, but the poem is introduced by a great conversation between Bart and Lisa Simpson about whether or not Poe's stories are still scary.



I might also include a SHORT PowerPoint presentation about Poe and his life and writing career.

2. Which one is the scariest?

In groups of 3-4, students will read three to five short stories from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz. After reading, they will have to rank the stories (#1 is the scariest, #5 is the least scary) and write a paragraph justifying their choices. The results will be compiled as a large group and the class will try to answer the question "What makes a scary story?"

3. Choosing a Topic: Scary Movies

This activity will be a webquest done in the computer lab. Each student will have a list of iMDB's Top 50 Horror Movies (as compiled by user ratings). Students will have to run web searches of each title and determine what the "scary part" of the movie is. For example, for the movie "Jaws" a student could write "Shark attacks." After compiling their data, the class will try to split the topics in to categories (i.e. monsters, etc.). The purpose will be to get kids thinking about what to include in their own scary stories.

http://www.imdb.com/chart/horror

4. Horror Movie Parody: What do we expect?

The class will view an episode of the family sitcom "Boy Meets World" which does a great job parodying horror movie conventions (plus, it's hilarious). The episode is very self-aware, and characters practically call each horror movie convention by name, which is good for middle schoolers attempting to break down the genre. As students watch, they will be responsible for making a list of the horror movie conventions mentioned explicitly and parodied in the action. Whole class discussion will follow.

5. Edgar Allan Poe's Stories

At least 3 of Poe's stories will be read in class (including, but not limited to, The Telltale Hear, The Cask of Amontillado, The Monkey's Paw, Fall of the House of Usher, etc.). Students will discuss and "map" the elements of fiction used in these stories, and use them as references when writing their own stories.

http://www.poestories.com/

6. Elements of Fiction

This unit might easily be used to teach the elements of fiction (and how they can be manipulated to create a scary story), but it might also be used as a review. Students will "map" the elements of fiction in Poe's stories as well as their own stories as a pre-writing activity.

http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/lit-elements/overview/


7. How to Write a Scary Scene

This lesson will provide practice for translating scary scenes into words. To accomplish this, the class will watch several suspenseful scenes from films and television shows that have written versions (for example, "The X-Files" and "Harry Potter"). Students will watch a scene and have time to write that scene as a short story. Students will be given a transcript of the scene to help them along. Several students will share, then the class will look at the actual book versions and compare the ways they chose to present the story.



8. Ghost Hunting Articles

This is a great lesson plan I found that examines two journalists' experiences ghost hunting.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/19991029friday.html

9. Scary Movie Review

After looking at a few mentor texts (film reviews from magazines and newspapers) students must complete a review of a scary (or suspenseful) film that they watch outside of class.

10. Writer's Workshop: Mini-lessons

As students begin the process of writing their stories, I would give a daily mini-lesson on the following topics:
  • effective leads
  • dialogue conventions
  • snapshots and thoughtshots (writing description and including characters' thoughts)
  • building suspense
  • illustrating the story
  • characterization

EVALUATION

This unit's focus is discovering what makes a story scary because the final assessment is for students to write their own scary stories. The links below are another teacher's take on the assignment and resources I might borrow in creating my own assignment. The process would involve several days of writer's workshop, including pre-writing, drafting, and significant peer revision and conferences with the teacher. I might also include a day where students are invited to read their stories to the class (with the lights low and scary music playing, of course!) My hope is that students are able to find ways to write scary stories without putting all the emphasis on gore, but instead making the fear psychological.


http://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson407/write-scary2.pdf

http://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson407/rubric-writing.pdfhttp://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson407/reflection.pdf

Extensions/Extra Credit: Students could do a study of a scary novel (such as one of the books in the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine or a Stephen King novel). This might include completing journal entries about each chapter, charting the elements of fiction, writing a review, etc.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Week Nine: Food

This week's chapter from Tooning In, "Popular Culture and the Dark Side of Food," turned out to be one of the most interesting chapters we've read so far. Much of the chapter focused on historical changes to the perception of the ideal body images and the disordered eating that has resulted from it. I've never read a historical analysis of body images linked to power structures before, but it makes total sense. The essay argues that as women gained more power in society (such as the right to vote and leadership positions in the workplace), "popular culture demanded that women show they were in control of their lives by being in control of their weight, the lower the better" (White 134). While I've heard the link between personal control/power issues and eating disorders, I'd never heard it explained at the societal level.

Another part of the essay I found especially interesting was its discussion of processed foods. Women, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were expected to define themselves by their ability to nurture their families. As the Industrial Revolution brought the rise of the processed food industry, advertising worked to "convince women that processed food was not only healthier for their families but brought rewards to the busy homemaker" (133). Women had to come to grips with the claims that formula was better for their babies than the breastmilk that came from their own bodies. Essentially, "the traditional role of nurturer was taken away" (133).

It was fascinating to me reading about how advertising of a particular product can completely change the societal roles as well as the physical and emotional health of a group of people. Research now tells us that natural foods and breastmilk are far healthier than formula and other processed foods. The organic and natural foods movement is doing its best to reverse the trend Heinz and other companies started a century ago, but I'm beginning to be convinced it's too late.

In the July/August 2008 issue of my very favorite nerdy magazine, Mental Floss, there was an article that explained how advertising spurred a similar shift in thinking. The article is called "Just Add Milk: How Cereal Transformed American Culture," an it's equally fascinating. Before the invention of cereal, "most Americans subsisted on a diet of pork, whiskey and coffee" (Lendler 54). A group of Christian fundamentalists blamed most health problems on meat consumption, and introduced a cereal called Granula "offered consumers a sin-free meat alternative that aimed to clear both conscience and bowels" (54). Dr. John Kellogg knocked off the product, dropping the religious message but promoting cereal's health factor.

Soon other companies like Post had picked up the idea of breakfast cereal because it's easy to produce and selling well. Because all the companies were selling essentially the same product under different names, advertisers realized they had to add a little something extra to get their brand off the shelves--cartoon character mascots. Soon, cereal advertising became geared almost entirely to children and something clicked in advertisers minds: "kids don't care about their colons. They want sugar. Lots of sugar" (57). The sugar cereal was born, and within 50 years the entire idea of the American breakfast had been completely transformed.

I think the cereal example is the perfect lesson to use in the classroom because it demonstrates how much food is linked to popular culture. Kids especially want to eat certain things because of their image more than health or even taste. The power of advertising to change society's values is a real thing that should be critically explored with young people.