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About 100-Word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing

What can 100-word stories help your students understand about writing? The short answer is, everything! This flash-fiction form has become a popular structure for efficiently teaching a wide variety of literary devices, terms, and processes in a targeted way. Part teaching guide, part anthology, 100-Word Stories is a dynamic guide complete with lessons and prompts to help young writers learn and practice literary elements, narrative skill, and personal voice. Through a collection of accessible lessons, each with a mentor text that is either student- or author-created, Culbertson and Faulkner share insight into using these “small, bright things” in the ELA classroom. The book’s structure is meant to be flexible–you might dip in and out of the lessons as needed to supplement existing curricula, or you might choose to teach an entire unit based on the lessons. No matter how you employ them, this short form can create expansive practice for young writers.