🍂✨ Embrace the Spooky Season with a Month-Long Gothic Lit Unit! 🎃📚
As the leaves change and the chill of fall settles in, it’s the perfect time to play up the eerie fun of the season with a unit on Gothic literature! I do a full, month-long Gothic Unit with my students, and they really get into the creepy tales, dark themes, and macabre vibes when you pair a unit like this with the month of October or at least try to do it so that Halloween falls sometime during the month when you plan this!
My unit is designed specifically for modern 11th graders, ensuring that students have the tools they need to really grasp what the classic stories are saying & that we’re asking questions that help them see how these stories connect to universal questions & experiences. This is the formula that helps me make sure that the kids are not only engaged but also inspired by these timeless classics: scaffold appropriately, link to real life, and deploy the unit during the month of October to benefit from the spooky fall vibes!
🎃 What Do We Do?
I get my students hyped for a month of thrills and chills with matching classroom decor and by bringing all the excitement and love that I have for this content on day one! I really stress how cool the texts we are going to explore are and how they are part of a long tradition of awesome Gothic literature; we explore iconic works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H.P. Lovecraft from “The Raven” to “The Yellow Wallpaper” to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and more!
My American Lit/English 11 students really get into the dark & haunting themes and timeless human questions of Gothic fiction. I love to see them coming to class excited to discuss, and I love how they will bring up our texts months later, even (especially “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and “The Outsider”). The stories and discussions are really fun for this age group, and they’re also developing Common Core reading, writing, and analytical skills while they work, which is a huge win!
👻Now, after building it for 13 years, the Gothic Unit that we work through in my class is available to teachers on TPT as a complete teaching toolkit, including all of the following elements:
- A Unit Calendar: A 2-page calendar for pacing and scope-and-sequence planning
- Teacher’s Gothic Literature Overview: A 2-page reference for teachers to provide context and background
- Introductory PowerPoint & Notes: A 19-slide PowerPoint plus a 4-page outline to introduce students to Gothic literature
📖 Texts Included:
- “The Raven”: 2-page text with line numbers
- “The Outsider”: 4-page text with page numbers
- “The Yellow Wallpaper”: 10-page text with page numbers
- “The Black Cat”: 7-page text with page numbers
- “The Fall of the House of Usher”: 15-page full text with stopping points for reflection and during-reading questions
🔮 Engaging Activities & Assessments
With a variety of engaging activities, graphic organizers, and discussion questions, you’ll have everything you need to guide your students through Gothic literature in a way that resonates with them. This unit includes:
- Critical reading and textual analysis
- Literary device identification and interpretation
- Gothic element recognition and application
- Vocabulary in context
- Paragraph and essay writing with textual evidence & citation
- CER paragraphs
- Narrative writing and creative storytelling
📝 Why I Love This Unit:
- Ready-to-use materials & answer keys save hours of prep time. Every quiz, worksheet, graphic organizer, & reading questions set comes with a FULL answer key!
- Engaging activities & reading questions specifically tailored to spark the interest of modern teens. (Also comes with a list of ways to use the questions beyond individual classwork or homework!)
- Comprehensive coverage of classic Gothic literature with lessons designed to make difficult texts much more approachable to modern teens & reluctant readers! All the time & care has been taken to include introductions and other materials (like graphic organizers) to make these stories READABLE for modern teens!
- Fosters deep, thoughtful discussions with 11th graders that they’ll remember & keep bringing up months later!
- Aligned with Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
🍁 Differentiation Options:
This unit provides various scaffolding and differentiation strategies, including:
- Graphic organizers
- Student-friendly introductions to complex texts
- Alternative ideas for using the reading questions (with classes that need more help, I tend to turn these into discussions, gallery walks, and group work)
- Multiple assessment options (with a wide variety of choices)
- Chunking for writing tasks
✨ Make It Meaningful
If you want to make your own Gothic unit, I think the most important thing to consider is how you’ll go about connecting these classic works to modern themes; in this way, you’ll help students see the relevance of Gothic literature today. For example, with my unit, we explore themes of isolation, identity, and the human psyche, & it’s all the more fun & engaging because we do it while embracing the Halloween spirit! I even get Halloween-themed fairy-style lights to hang around the room, which look pretty cool on dark, stormy October days!
🎉 Bring It All Together
With a large variety of assessments—ranging from quizzes to creative writing projects—you can ensure that ALL students can engage with the material meaningfully. My 30-day unit includes:
- Reading quizzes focused on RL.11-12.1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 skills for “The Raven,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Black Cat.”
- A week-long narrative writing project with a special story-planning graphic organizer
- Final literary analysis essay/paragraph assignments with prompts and a sample finished essay & sample finished paragraph (Use the CER paragraph final assessment for students or classes who/that need more guidance.)
So, consider leaning in to the October vibes with open arms and adding a dash of spookiness to your units this year! A Gothic Literature Unit is fun for the students because it’s an invitation to explore the darker side of literature and tap into some of those atmospheric feelings of fall at the same time! 🍂📚✨
You can create your own Gothic unit, or try mine! It makes Gothic literature ACCESSIBLE and engaging with a variety of unique options I think you & your students will love!
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