January 14th--Writing History Timeline

January 7th--Tell Tale Heart Final Project

The Tell-Tale Heart Project

Directions: Choose one of the following activities and complete as a culminating project for the The Tell-Tale Heart.  This completed project must be multi-genre (composed of both text and images), text-based, and awesome.  Your published project should be published to your blog.

Creative Writing

• Imagine that you are one of the police officers who come to investigate the shriek heard in the night.  Describe the situation from your point of view.  Make sure to include a description of the house during your search and the man’s appearance and behavior.  Do you notice anything strange about him? What are your thoughts during the chat before he confesses?  What happens after that? This should be at least one page long and consistent with the facts in the story

• Complete a one-page interior monologue for the victim: What is the victim thinking? Does he have any idea what is going to happen to him? Why did he take in the psychopath?

• Pretend you are a defense attorney trying to get an insanity plea for the narrator.  Write down your speech to the jury convincing them that the narrator was insane at the time of the murders.  Be sure to give solid evidence from your story to back up your argument.  Your argument should be about one page.

• Pretend that you are a reported for the local paper.  You have received exclusive rights to interview the murderer.  Set up an interview in newspaper style format with complete questions.  Then, answer your questions in the way that the murderer would.  You must stay in character for both people.  This should be approximately 1-1/2 pages in length

• Use the Tell Tale Heart as a mentor text for your own short story.  Copy Poe’s style and organization but make the events of the story your own. This should be approximately 1 page in length.

Visual Representation

• Choose a sentence or passage from the story and draw a picture of the image that it creates in your mind.  Your picture should be in color, detailed, and be neat.  Be sure to write the passage you chose from the story on your picture.Beneath your project, write a ½-1 page description of the scene you drew, explaining how your project is based on evidence from the text AND inferences you made about the text.  

• Create a visual map of the Tell Tale Heart.  Your map should include sketches and symbols of important characters and moments to provide a bigger picture the story.  Relevant excerpts (with page numbers) from the story should also be included on your map. Beneath your map, write a ½-1 page description of it, explaining what your map shows and how it is based on evidence from the text AND inferences you made about the text.

Extra Credit

Complete a project option from both the visual and written options.  Both projects should be published in the same blog post.

January 2nd--EA Poe Scav. Hunt