Middle school is a funny place. Students can be mature and insightful one minute, obtuse and petulant the next. Yet even the most resistant scholar will enjoy a good story. The 40 stories below are sometimes surprising, other times hair-raising. They are all guaranteed to raise questions and instigate discussions in your classroom that can lead to meaningful dialogues about what really matters in the lives of your students.

Need a short story fast? Engage your middle school (or high school!) students with these 40 short stories! #shortstories Click To Tweet

All Curated Access Pass

Just $3 per month (or $36 your first year!)

Note: Would you like access to ALL of our curated short story resources — PLUS a free lesson plan template you can use for ANY short story — right here on this page — without having to enter your email address more than a dozen times?

For less than the cost of one cup of coffee shop java, you can have ongoing access to current and future curated resources! Let us do the late-night searching for you. Sign up here for instant digital access.

Purchased access but still not seeing links to the resources? Make sure you login to your account by clicking the Customer area link at the top of the page and entering the login information you created. Click the “All Curated Short Story Access Membership” link in your customer area.

BONUS!

An RTE subscriber recently emailed me to ask if there was a simple way to subscribe to all the curated resources in one place, without having to enter an email address for every short story. At the time, there wasn't, but we have worked out a way to make it easy for you to access all the resources in one place — right here on this page! For just $3 per month, you can have ongoing access to current and future curated resources! Let us do the late-night searching for you. Sign up here for instant digital access

All Curated Access Pass

Purchased access but still not seeing links to the resources? Make sure you login to your account by clicking the Customer area link at the top of the page and entering the login information you created. You can then return to this post, or click the “All Curated Short Story Access Membership” link in your customer area. Once you login, your short story list will look like this.

NOTE: Curated resources do not include the units that RTE has developed in house.

Copyright notice: These stories are published on sites other than reThinkELA.com and NO copyrighted stories are excerpted or quoted in RTE-created materials. Some stories are in the public domain (not copyrighted), or are excerpts of larger works, while others are not. In some cases, teachers may print a class set for their own classroom usage, but there are exceptions. Please check with your district regarding its policies and licenses for reproducing printed copies. Generally speaking, you may ask students to download their own copies (outside of the one you download for your own use) to their devices for their own educational studies.