Bridge-ela Lessons

Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character’s flaw can be a benefit.

What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?

What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?

Have you ever noticed that some stories have awfully similar problems? What if we looked for the most unusual way of solving a repeating problem?

What is the Brick Pig’s philosophy? How would he apply it to the characters in Harry Potter?

What would Socrates have thought if he watched Frozen?

What if one character dressed up as another for Halloween? Would the Cat in the Hat pick Captain Jack Sparrow, because they’re both chaotic yet good-natured people? Would Elsa dress up as The Ice King since they are both lonely?

Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.

Imagine being a character in a story. Are you worried that your story’s narrator may inaccurately describe you? What if they reveal something you wanted to be kept secret? Do narrators have too much power!?

What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

Create a pixelated icon that represents the essence of a character!

How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?

Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?

Ever read a student’s story that was just event after event after event and then a very sudden ending? They lack an understanding of a plot’s structure. With the help of Finding Nemo, I break down how to set up a well-structured plot.

If your students’ stories are packed with endless ninja fights or arguments between frenemies, it’s time to expose them to a wider range of conflicts.

A typical student narrative includes plot and characters but lacks a larger idea to hold it all together. This is where a lesson on themes comes in…

We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: “structure increases creativity.” I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.

Are students’ characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.