Little Worlds: A Collection of Short Stories for the Middle School

by Peter Guthrie and Mary Page

Book Overview

Suspense, humor, horror, betrayal, excitement: Little Worlds transports your students into the stuff of life that steals their attention, even that of stubborn readers. Featuring some of literature's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1877653527
• ISBN13: 9781877653520
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Wayside Publishing
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Age Range: 12 to 14 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 9

Customer Reviews

Very important short stories

I am a seventh grader, and this book is part of our course reading. There are some wonderful short stories in it, ranging in difficulty in both the fluency with which the story was written, as well as in the vocabulary used, for example, the difficult vocabulary in "The Masque of Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe. There are quite a few important, famous, and memorable short stories in Little Worlds, including the infamous story, "The Gift of the Magi," as well as, "The Necklace" and "The Monkey's Paw." But, I do warn you, the book includes some very controversial, yet famous stories like, "The Lottery." Overall, I must say that Little Worlds is a truly wonderful book with exceptional story selections. Some I did not enjoy, but all of them taught an important life lesson to me. Just get a good teacher to tell you about them as well!

The Truth

Being a student in 7th grade, I highly recomend this book for teaching children my age. But I must say that some stories like "To Build A Fire" are boring. And as for the person who wrote it was horrible... WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?!?!?!? Please read this book. It also has a wonderful vocabularly to help students and peopel in gernal learn.

Better than your average schoolbook...

Little Worlds is a collection of short stories that was the textbook for my seventh grade honors English class for our short story unit. Overall, I enjoyed many of the stories in this book. It contains many classics, including "The Lottery" and "The Gift of the Magi", as well as some of my personal favorites, "Winter Night" and "Marigolds". English homework became something that wasn't so much of a chore anymore, because the short stories in this collection were, for the most part, well-selected. There were some that my classmates and I did not like, because of the significant lack of action. Yet we always managed to have good discussions on these stories.Now that our short story unit has ended, and we have moved on to poetry in my English class, Little Worlds has been retired to my bookshelf. The cover is bent, the pages wrinkled and covered with notes, the binding is worn. That is because of all the use it has gotten...carried to and from English and science and math and back home again. This is a great collection for the short story reader, and it is guaranteed to arouse a lot of discussion!

A Wonderful Class Set!

I purchased these books as a class set for my advanced eighth grade Language Arts students. The stories are fantastic. The stories will cause students to discuss and challenge the themes presented. Students must understand the short story before comprehending every story presented--today's students expect to be entertained, and, quite frankly, that is not the purpose for all short stories. As a teacher, I found this classroom resource invaluable. This is a wonderful book with memorable stories: "The Monkey's Paw," "The Necklace," "An Occurance at Owlcreek Bridge," "The Gift of the Magi," etc. It's a must have for the accelerated middle school student!

A good Middle School anthology of short fiction

This is a very useful resource for Middle School teachers and librarians. The first half of the anthology contains stories which are grouped according to specific literary terms (character, theme, etc.). Each cluster of stories is introduced by a one to two page description of the literary term the stories illlustrate. The second half of the anthology contains short stories that are slightly more complex and illustrate multiple literary terms. This setup makes it a very useful teaching tool. I have used this book with eighth graders and have found it hugely successful.