40 Excellent Short Stories For Middle School

posted on May 13, 2014 Middle school is a funny place. Students can be mature and insightful one minute, obtuse and petulant the next. Yet even the most resistant scholar will enjoy a good story. The 40 stories below are sometimes surprising, other times hair-raising. They are all guaranteed to raise questions and instigate discussions in your classroom that can lead to meaningful dialogues about what really matters in the lives of your students. Need a short story fast? Engage your middle school (or high school!) students with these 40 short stories! #shortstories Click To Tweet All Curated Access Pass Just $3 per month (or $36 your first year!) Note: Would you like access to ALL of our curated short story resources — PLUS a free lesson plan template you can use for ANY short story — right here on this page — without having to enter your email address more than a dozen times? For less than the cost of one cup of coffee shop java, you can have ongoing access to current and future curated resources! Let us do the late-night searching for you. Sign up here for instant digital access. Purchased access but still not seeing links to the resources? Make sure you login to your account by clicking the Customer area link at the top of the page and entering the login information you created. Click the â€Å"All Curated Short Story Access Membership† link in your customer area. All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury | Short Story Unit | Short Story Unit  on TpT Amigo Brothers by Piri Thomas The Scholarship Jacket by Marta Salinas Icarus and Daedalus by Josephine   Preston Peabody Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Raymond’s Run by Toni Cade Bambara Rules of the Game by Amy Tan The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant by W.D. Wetherell To Build a Fire by Jack London The Ransom of Red Chief by O. Henry (Available in our All Access Membership) Seventh Grade by Gary Soto A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (Available in our All Access Membership) The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton (Available in our All Access Membership) There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury (Available in our All Access Membership) The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Hearts and Hands by O. Henry (Available in our All Access Membership) Mother and Daughter by Gary Soto (Available in our All Access Membership) The Rocking Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence (Available in our All Access Membership) Miss Awful by Arthur Cavenaugh (Available in our All Access Membership) Charles by Shirley Jackson (Available in our All Access Membership) The Moustache by Robert Cormier (Available in our All Access Membership) Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Available in our All Access Membership) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka* (Available in our All Access Membership) The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell (Available in our All Access Membership) The Two Brothers by Leo Tolstoy (Available in our All Access Membership) The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty (Available in our All Access Membership) An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (Available in our All Access Membership) The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (Available in our All Access Membership) Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving (Available in our All Access Membership) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving The Third Wish by Joan Aiken (Available in our All Access Membership) The Landlady by Roald Dahl The Fun They Had by Isaac Asimov (Available in our All Access Membership) Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling (Available in our All Access Membership) The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe Thank you, Ma’am by Langston Hughes Names/Nombres by Julia Alvarez BONUS! The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry |  Assessment Activity Creative Writing Project | Assessment Activity Creative Writing Project on TpT The Possibility of Evil by Shirley Jackson  |  Assessment Activity Writing Project |  Assessment Activity Writing Project on TpT The Masque of the Red by Death by Edgar Allan Poe* |  Assessment Activity | Assessment  Activity  on TpT The Stone by Lloyd Alexander (Available in our All Access Membership) 2 B R 0 2 B by Kurt Vonnegut (Available in our All Access Membership) Note:  An RTE subscriber recently emailed me to ask if there was a simple way to subscribe to all the curated resources in one place, without having to enter an email address for every short story. At the time, there wasn’t, but we have worked out a way to make it easy for you to access all the resources in one place — right here on this page! For just $3 per month, you can have ongoing access to current and future curated resources! Let us do the late-night searching for you. Sign up here for instant digital access. All Curated Access Pass Purchased access but still not seeing links to the resources? Make sure you login to your account by clicking the Customer area link at the top of the page and entering the login information you created. You can then return to this post, or click the â€Å"All Curated Short Story Access Membership† link in your customer area. Once you login, your short story list will look like this. NOTE: Curated resources do not include the units that RTE has developed in house. Copyright notice:  These stories are published on sites other than reThinkELA.com and NO copyrighted stories are excerpted or quoted in RTE-created materials. Some stories are in the public domain (not copyrighted), or are excerpts of larger works, while others are not. In some cases, teachers may print a class set for their own classroom usage, but there are exceptions. Please check with your district regarding its policies and licenses for reproducing printed copies. Generally speaking, you may ask students to download their own copies (outside of the one you download for your own use) to their devices for their own educational studies. Michelle WatersI am a secondary English Language Arts teacher, a University of Oklahoma student working on my Master’s of Education in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum with an concentration in English Education, and a NBPTS candidate. I am constantly seeking ways to amplify my students’ voices and choices.