“The Wife’s Story” by Ursula K. Le Guin Quiz and Close Reading Bundle

Item description

Help high school students extend reading comprehension and analyze plot developments in “The Wife’s Story” by Ursula K. Le Guin with this bundle of formative assessments. Delivered in printable Word Document and PDF formats, this bundle offers a plot-based quiz, a close reading worksheet, craft analysis activity, and answer keys. 

By completing the plot-based quiz, students will demonstrate knowledge of the following:

• The narrator’s emotional state
• The narrator’s characterization of her husband
• The relationship between the narrator and her sister
• A quality about the narrator’s husband that “brings the shivers on” her
• The moon’s role in the husband’s transformation
• The “curse in his blood”
• The husband’s tendency to leave home abruptly
• The husband’s strange smell upon returning
• The children’s fear of their own father
• A physical transformation
• The story’s resolution

By completing the close reading activity, students will perform the following tasks:

• Identify what the text states explicitly as well as implicitly
• Define complex words and phrases as they are used in the text
• Explore how complex characters think, behave, develop, and interact
• Examine the protagonist’s internal conflict
• Apply knowledge of literary devices including anaphora, simile, and foreshadowing
• Determine the significance of the narrator’s “grief howl”
• Examine how the author’s wording contributes to the audience’s understanding of the narrator’s mental state
• Cite textual details that evoke a sense of sympathy within readers
• Analyze the author’s craft to explain how language contributes to the major revelation near the story’s conclusion
• Write ideas with clarity, accuracy, and precision

By completing the craft analysis activity, students will do the following:

• Analyze how the author used characterization, description, imperfect grammar, foreshadowing, irony, simile, and redundancy to establish a tense and abnormal tone in the narrative

Materials are available for teaching a variety of texts such as:

• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
• Feed by M.T. Anderson
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
• The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare