The story “The Birthmark” by Nathanial Hawthorne is fun to teach with high school students. The horror in watching Aylmer destroy his “perfect” wife makes for a compelling story. Students can discuss why the wife accepted her fate or if Aylmer learned anything from his doomed experiment. Can anyone truly be perfect? Should a partner accept “less than perfect?”
Write a Newspaper Article
Combining real-world writing, creative writing, and text study, students will write a newspaper article about the death of Georgiana. Consider what Aylmer admits about what happened. Students might address community response to the event as well.
But the Newspaper Writing Activity with instructions, rubric, and brief handout on Newspaper Article writing.
Create an Infographic of the Events of the Text
Students will create an infographic with events of the text. Infographics are a fun visual activity that combine creative elements with the literature study.
This resource is included as one of 9 options in the Culminating Projects set.
Character Analysis of Aylmer or Georgiana
Analyze the motivation of Aylmer or Georgiana in their choices. Students can create a written or multimedia project with their findings, including evaluation and support from the text in their project.
This resource is included as one of 9 options in the Culminating Projects set.
Personal Writing
In the story, Georgiana feels unappreciated. As an anticipatory set or response writing, students can complete a personal writing about a time that they felt unappreciated. Students will reflect on their experience.
Buy the Personal Writing Narrative and Multimedia with options for essay and multimedia projects, with instructions and rubrics.
Reading Activities
Reading questions are a great way to hold students accountable for the reading. They can used during read-alouds, with students listening to the text and completing as they go. They also work well for independent reading. A combination of recall questions to note basic story elements and inference questions to get students at a bit higher level thinking makes for a good activity.
Buy the Reading Activities with Reading questions, plus graphic organizers. Also critical thinking questions with quick paragraph responses to the text that stand-alone or build on projects and essays.
The items listed in this post are sold in the money saving The Birthmark Activities Bundle PDF. Great for building a unit including “The Birthmark” by Nathanial Hawthorne.
Building a unit– combine this story with other stories of Science Gone Wrong.