Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories - Quizzes and Analysis Activities (Volume 2)

This short story bundle includes vocabulary games, comprehension quizzes, and close reading inference worksheets to ensure high school students can read with a purpose and exercise critical thinking and literary analysis skills. Four narratives, each written by Edgar Allan Poe, are featured: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Premature Burial.” Answer keys and copies of the public domain texts are included. Materials are delivered in editable Word Document and printable PDF formats. By engaging with these activities, students will:

• Read for literal comprehension
• Utilize dictionaries to ensure knowledge of word meanings
• Discern the most proper application of words as they are used in sentences
• Infer the intended effects of the author’s word choices and narrative techniques
• Demonstrate knowledge of the conventions of Dark Romanticism
• Discern the intended effects of the author’s diction, punctuation, and narrative techniques
• Examine how complex characters think, behave, interact, and develop
• Apply knowledge of literary devices such as metaphor, foreshadowing, personification, situational irony, and more
• Conduct brief research on Swiss painter Henry Fuseli to develop greater understanding of Poe’s allusion to him in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Explore the connection between the plot of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the content of a poem titled “The Haunted Palace”
• Support claims and inferences with sound reasoning and relevant evidence
• Write about Gothic fiction with clarity, accuracy, and precision