HORROR STORIES

Teacher: Magrath, María del Pilar

Area: Language Practices.
Course: 4th “U”. EP No. 9

Foundation:
“The area of Language Practices conceives language as a social and cultural practice that
adapts dynamically and with great versatility to the context of particular uses” (DGC and E, 2008:44).
These are always present in social life and are exercised for various purposes, privileging the
practices themselves as the object of teaching. For this reason, they are taken as a reference model,
to include them as a teaching object in Primary Education, trying to preserve the essential, avoiding
the schooling of these practices.
The purpose of teaching reading and writing is to train autonomous readers and writers. In the
Second Cycle of Primary Education it is extremely necessary to generate spaces where literature
takes place, where the experience of exchange, personal involvement in the story of the characters
and in the recreation of other worlds, enjoyment, have priority.
Within the framework of contextualized reading and writing situations, it is important for
children to recognize that spelling is a convention that must be respected because it favors
communication and facilitates the anticipation of the meaning of the texts.
“Spelling includes all those non-alphabetic aspects of the writing system: the use of
punctuation marks, the use of capital letters, the spelling of words, etc.” (Mirta Torres, 1991:21)
Likewise, it is the teacher's responsibility to ensure that children can read and listen to different
literary works and in this way build their own selection criteria and enrich their interpretations, training
them as readers of literature.
“A literature reader recommends texts, follows favorite authors or genres, selects fragments to
reread or establishes links with other materials, such as films, series, music or paintings. Literature in
school has to refer to these practices to familiarize students and allow them, in this way, to participate
in them from an increasingly broad and diversified repertoire” (DGC and E, 2018:44)

 Communicative Purpose: That students can enjoy the world created by the stories and
exchange impacts and reflections with other readers.
 Didactic Purpose: That students are formed as readers of literature, putting into play
practices and tasks of the reader that favor the construction of increasingly elaborate
meanings about horror stories.

Contents:
 Choose literary works to read with others and individually
 Read and share the reading of the works with others
 Adapt the reading modality to the literary genre
 Use knowledge about genre to interpret the text
 Write literary and literary texts
Class 1: 2 modules:
The teacher tells her students that they will begin to work with horror stories. To introduce the topic he
says: “Human beings feel fear in a lot of situations, some real and others imaginary. When faced with
fear, different things happen to each of us: we feel the need to flee, to face it, to cover our eyes and
ears, to get under the blankets or to look for someone to protect us. Another way to face our fears is
to express them with words and images. And perhaps that is why men and women tell legends, write
stories and novels, film movies and paint pictures in which fear has its place. “We each feel afraid of
different things, what are you afraid of?”
After this introduction and exchange, the teacher presents a list of single words, investigating which of
these words lead to thinking about scary stories? Reading them one by one and marking those that
the students consider respond to what is stated.

The teacher suggests listening to the story “Manos” by Elsa Bornemann, in video format. Once
finished, the teacher will open a space for exchange

“In this story, who narrated the story? who are the protagonists? Why should they spend the night
alone in the house? What happens to the elderly? What other facts contribute to making you afraid?
At the end of the story he says: Whose??? —Oriana corrected, with a frightened grimace. She
had been taken by both hands! Hands. Four more hands apart from the six of the girls,
moving in the darkness of that night to meet others, seeking to hold on to each other. Human
hands. Spectral hands.
(Perhaps—sometimes, from time to time—the ghosts are also afraid... and need us...) Is the
ending predictable or surprising? Why? What interpretations can you come up with for the end of the
story? Who do you think gives hands to girls? Do you think that in the story there is an emergence of
something abnormal in the daily order? Because?"
The teacher will record the students' responses on the blackboard.

Class 2: 2 modules:
The teacher begins the class by saying: “Horror stories are part of what human beings from all times
and from all places in the world see, hear and tell each other. "That which causes us fear also causes
us interest and the desire to communicate it."
After this brief introduction, the teacher presents the story “There are ghosts in my room” by
Mercedes Pérez Sabbi.

There are ghosts in my room

Mercedes Pérez Sabbi
After reading, the teacher opens a space for exchange, where students can explain what they thought
of the story. The teacher will guide the exchange, asking, for example, what was the story telling?
What perceptions did the protagonist have? whether the ending was predictable or, on the contrary,
surprised them, among others.
Once the exchange is finished, the teacher proposes the following activity:

Alphabetical:
Write sentences in which they describe the terrifying objects, elements, sensations and sounds that
Heloísa encounters along the way and make her think that there are ghosts in her room.
For example, when we say that “a being is strange and terrifying,” or “that a house was very
dark and therefore scary,” we are describing.

Syllabic-alphabetic:
Write a list of the terrifying objects, elements, sensations and sounds that Heloísa encounters along
the way that make her think there is a ghost in her room.
After sharing the different productions, the teacher will record some of them on a poster, so that they
can serve as input for subsequent classes.

Class 3: 2 modules:
In this class we will resume what we worked on in the previous class with the story “There is a ghost
in my room.” The teacher begins by saying: “To tell horror stories, the authors of literary texts use
what are called resources, such as the description of spaces, characters and objects that are scary or
the expressions, words, that serve to convey these types of sensations. Do you remember that when
we worked with Gustavo Roldán's stories we talked about sensory images? Sensory images are
resources used in texts and consist of describing
with words sensations of the five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing.”
After this brief introduction, the teacher asks them to reread the story and do the following activity:

Alphabetical:
1- Taking into account the descriptions of the story, I wrote a short text of how you imagine
Heloise's room. You could start like this: “Heloise's room was…”
2- According to the description you made in the previous point, draw Heloísa's room.
3- Look for one or more words or sentences in the story that correspond to the following
meanings and transcribe them:
VIEW:

EAR:

TOUCH:
4- Remember a situation you have experienced in which you had sensations with smell and taste
and tell them in a short text.

Syllabic-alphabetic:
1- Taking into account the descriptions of the story, I wrote a list of words of how you imagine
Heloise's room.
2- According to the description you made in the previous point, draw Heloísa's room.
3- The following sentences correspond to sensory images. Write down in each one, which sense
it corresponds to (sight-hear-touch)
 “ Yes, I knew it, they were there, in some corner looking at me from above or from the floor.”
__________________________________________________________________________
 “A gasp guided my steps, a sarcastic laugh diverted them. Wow...! The sounds alternated: laughter...,
moans..., laughter..., howls.” ________________________________
 “The fingers of my hands were groping for a portion of something familiar: the side wood of my bed,
the rounded tip of my nightstand, the fringed pillow, the woolly hairs of my
wrist”__________________________________________________________________

4- Complete the following sentence:

 It was lunch time and I could already feel the _______________ of the stew that mom
was cooking and I could already ________________ in my mouth.

Class 4: 2 modules:
This class takes place in the library. The teacher begins by saying: “When we read a story, one of the
first things we find is the title, which is located at the top of the text, in different, larger letters, and is
usually brief. Sometimes it can even be just one word! The title tells us the theme of what we are
going to read in the story. The story by Mercedes Pérez Sabbi, “There are ghosts in my room”, which
we have been reading, belongs to the horror genre, which is characterized by seeking to produce
fear in the reader. The types of letters often already give us clues, clues, about the subject of what
we are going to read, because they also seek to generate an effect on us. The same can be said
about the photo of the window with curtains that move in the night, which accompanies the story.
Doesn't it remind you of a movie, television series or comic book that you have already seen or read?
After providing a space for the students to comment on the question posed, the teacher suggests the
group watch “The Swamp and the Moon” from the Terror series on the Pakapaka channel.
https://youtu.be/iWpCJoAUtns
After the video and after a brief exchange, the teacher explains: “Films and literature use different
resources, in addition to the text, to produce effects on us. As happens in “The Swamp and the
Moon”, with the noise of the wind, these resources can be sound. For example, the sound of
footsteps, the meowing of a cat, a muffled scream, high-pitched and sinister laughter, the creaking of
a door, the keys of an out-of-tune piano; images: dark colors, blurred silhouettes, shadows that are
confused with figures, suspiciously alive, almost human objects, like dolls, sinister places, like
abandoned houses; moving images: a character who, after hearing the sound of footsteps, goes up a
staircase towards a deserted hallway in the middle of the night, among other possibilities”
Once in the classroom, the teacher suggests that they look at different covers of horror books. To do
this, it will have (physical) books from the school library, and images of printed covers. After exploring
the tapas, propose the following activity:

1- Imagine what other titles could go well with the story of this story and serve to produce fear.
Then, write two new titles for the story, always thinking that it is horror. They can write them by
drawing different types of letters. For example:

2- Invent the cover of a horror book. It must have:

 A horror title .
 A scary drawing , like the one in the story you read.
 The name of the author of the story book . To invent it, you can use names of characters
from movies, series or horror stories that you know and mix them with names of family
members, friends or friends of yours. For example: Luisina Frankenstein, Manuela Chuky
González, Mariana Kruger from Poltergeist. You can also use those of the characters from
the show “The Swamp and the Moon.” Remember that names are PROPER NOUNS and
must be capitalized.

Class 5: 2 modules:
This class will provide a moment to finish the productions from the previous class. Then the teacher
proposes work on different types of narrators.
“When we read a story, who owns that voice that tells us what we are reading?
The voice that is in charge of telling, from its point of view, the events of a story is the narrator.
Since he only exists in the narrative, we know him only through his words, which we read for
ourselves, or that we hear when they are read by others, as happens with Ema in Pakapaka's
program, “The Swamp and the Moon.” ”. She is the one who reads the story to us, but she is not its
author or narrator. In the case of the story “There are ghosts in my room”, Heloísa, the protagonist, is
the one who narrates. We know this because we see everything through his eyes and he tells us the
facts of the story using the grammatical first person of the verbs. For example, in the story we read:
“The sounds alternated: laughter..., moans..., laughter..., howls. I stumbled, spun quickly. “They
were there, I knew it.” When, as we see here, the narrating voice coincides with that of the
protagonist, we call that voice: protagonist narrator .
There are other types of narrators. Another widely used in horror stories is the narrator who knows
everything and tells the events of the story in the third person. In those cases, we cannot put a name
to it. There what we find is an omniscient narrator : he knows more than the characters, he can
relate what others think and feel, and he narrates using the grammatical third person in the verbs.
Precisely, he is the narrator of the program “The swamp and the moon” that Ema reads.
The teacher proposes the following activity:
1- These are introductions to horror stories. Indicate whether they correspond to a protagonist
narrator or an omniscient narrator:
 “It was a dark and spooky night, and Frankenstein stalked the streets. I was watching
TV and suddenly the power went out. I was so scared that I grabbed a flashlight and
covered my head”
____________________________________________________________
 “It was 3 am and everything seemed to indicate that it was going to be another quiet
night in the hospital. Luisa, the nurse, was about to make herself a coffee when she
suddenly realized that the security cameras were capturing something a bit unusual”
_____________

Class 6: 2 modules:
In this class we will resume what we have worked on so far. “What would happen if we told a horror
story from the perspective of a monster or a ghost? What type of narrator would be appropriate to tell
the story? How would I start telling it? What feelings would you have? Think about the places you
would walk through, how you would move, what things you would see first and then what you think
they are like. And, mainly, what I would think and what I would do to provoke fear in others. What if
he feels afraid too?” The teacher suggests that the students write a horror story, which will be written
by dictation to the teacher. “How about we write our own story! But, first of all, we have to think about
various aspects such as the characters and their characteristics, the place where the story is going to
take place, what the conflict is going to be, among others. “We are going to look at everything we
recorded in these classes and select what we like to add to our history.”
Once the selection is made, the teacher prepares to record the students' proposals, remembering that
it is the first version, which must be reviewed and rewritten if necessary. Once the final version is
obtained, the teacher will record it on a poster.

Class 7: 2 modules:
In this class we will continue with the writing of the horror story. To do this, the teacher will form three
groups and ask them to write the part that corresponds to the conflict of the story. Once the activity is
finished, each group will share their production with the rest of the class and then select the one they
liked the most. Once chosen, the teacher will reread it to be reviewed and rewritten if they consider it
necessary.
Once the writing is finished, the teacher will add the continuation of the story to the previous poster.

Class 8: 2 modules:
In this class the writing of the story will be completed, and again it will be by dictation to the teacher.
Once written, reviewed and corrected, the teacher will proceed to copy it onto the poster.

Class 9: 1 module:
The teacher gives the finished printed version to her students and suggests that they write a title for
their horror story.