Five stories in the first unit, read closely and argued about. They are here because each one does something different with the same small form.
| Story | Writer | Why this one |
|---|---|---|
| ”A Secret Lost in the Water” | Roch Carrier (Quebec) | A father, a son, and a skill that does not survive the move to the city |
| ”The Leaving” | Budge Wilson (Nova Scotia) | A mother leaves for one night, and the whole family arrangement becomes visible |
| ”Borders” | Thomas King | A border crossing where the entire conflict is one word, repeated |
| ”The Sniper” | Liam O’Flaherty (Ireland) | Two pages, one civil war, one last sentence |
| ”The Painted Door” | Sinclair Ross (Saskatchewan) | Isolation, weather as pressure, and an ending readers still argue about |
Content
“The Sniper” and “The Painted Door” both end in a death. “The Leaving” deals with a family in which a mother has been treated as staff.
How we read them
Three passes, per Close Reading. Then one of these questions each time:
- Where does the story start, and what has been left out?
- Whose perspective organises it, and who is described rather than heard?
- What is repeated?
- What does the last sentence do to the first?
What the five have in common
Very little, which is the point. By the end of the unit you should be able to say what a short story can do that a novel cannot: compression, a single turn, and an ending that reorganises everything before it.
The task
They feed The Story Behind the Story — you write one, and then write about the choices you made.
Curriculum connection
B1.1
read a variety of student- and teacher-selected texts from diverse cultures and historical periods, identifying specific purposes for reading (e.g., compare the diction and imagery used in a contemporary poem and a poem on the same theme from a different historical period; develop a character sketch based on a brief biography of a historical figure they admire to prepare for a short role-play presentation; use an electronic database to locate information from various sources about religious or cultural practices of an ethnic group different from their own)
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B1.2
select and use appropriate reading comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading to understand texts, including increasingly complex texts (e.g., make jot notes based on teacher prompts during a read-aloud; pose questions about a character’s motivation or actions in a fictional text; role-play alternative solutions to a conflict presented in a text; activate prior knowledge about a topic using an anticipation guide)
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B2.2
identify a variety of text features and explain how they help communicate meaning (e.g., “explanatory” titles or epigraphs for individual chapters in a novel; logo size, illustrations, font sizes, and colour in an advertisement)
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