Secondary English Language Arts Resources
Do your students include science fiction genre loves? Then we have a 3-4 week unit of creative writing, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking ready to boost their creativity!
Star Trek. Star Wars. Science fiction has long given us a creative way to a grapple with tough issues like war in a safe way. We teach this genre through short stories like All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury or Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
This unit — with built in creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and a dystopian twist — will engage your students as they plot to build a species of space aliens, develop an entire planet, create origin myths, develop a legendary hero, plan out their battle strategies and declare the impending war.
You'll receive a teacher's guide that walks you through the process of preparing for the unit, offers advice on how to handle some common group work problems, and includes printable lesson plans.
The teacher's guide includes instructions to help you prepare for class ahead of time, how to manage the quickwrites during class, including estimates of how much time each element will take. I recommend that you write with your students, and I include a recommended process for guiding students through the writing process as they extend a quickwrite of their choice into a longer text.
Student and teacher-created mentor texts are also included to help provide inspiration as needed.