The Lottery by Shirley Jackson – Short Story Unit – Activities and Assessments

Description

Updated in 2025! This short story unit for Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” includes games, vocabulary worksheets, literary analysis activities, assessment tools, graphic organizers, and more. Suitable for online learning and Google Classroom®!

☄️ Save over 90% with this special bundle price and additional discounts!

Included with this Short Story Unit for “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson:

• “The Lottery” Reading Comprehension Quizzes – Digital & Print
• Guided Reading & Discussion Questions – Digital & Print
• Character Chart Graphic Organizers for “The Lottery” – Digital & Print
• “Global Rituals” Comparison Activity – Digital & Print
• Compare and Contrast Activity: “The Lottery” vs. The Hunger Games – Digital & Print
• Netflix Adaptation Assignment – Digital & Print
• Jeopardy Review Game – Digital & Print
• Editable Test Question Bank – Google Docs®, Google Forms®, and Microsoft Word®
• Detailed Answer Keys, Rubrics, and Mentor Texts
• Teacher Instructions for using these resources

Included with this bundle for Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”:

1. “The Lottery” Bell Ringers – Reading Comprehension Quizzes

Assess students’ knowledge of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery using these reading comprehension questions! These bell ringer quizzes include six close reading questions that evaluate students’ reading comprehension. Each question targets a key moment in The Lottery, ensuring students remain attentive to important details, literary devices, and plot progression. These short assessments are ideal for quick daily check-ins, warm-ups, or formative assessments following a first read or group reading of The Lottery. With ready-to-go questions and answer keys, you can seamlessly integrate these bell ringers into any lesson plan focused on The Lottery.

2. “The Lottery” Guided Reading Discussion Questions

This guided reading activity for Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery short story includes comprehension questions and answers for pre-reading, post-reading, and deeper discussion. Explore symbolism, mood, theme, and other important literary aspects of this classic short story. With 25 thought-provoking questions, students will be challenged to think critically about the unsettling ritual in The Lottery, its implications on society, and how Jackson uses irony and foreshadowing. Use this resource to guide classroom conversation, literature circle discussions, or even independent reflection assignments centered on The Lottery. It helps scaffold student thinking while encouraging them to dig deeper into literary elements.

3. Character Charts for “The Lottery”

These character charts prompt students to use text evidence to explore characterization in The Lottery. Students will identify and record meaningful quotations for each character, and explain the significance of the quotation in relation to theme and characterization. Characters like Tessie Hutchinson, Mr. Summers, and Old Man Warner are central to understanding the themes of tradition and conformity in The Lottery, and this activity ensures students don’t just summarize, but analyze. By focusing on how each character contributes to the story’s disturbing resolution, students will deepen their comprehension of The Lottery while building close reading and analytical skills.

4. “The Lottery” Global Rituals Activity – Real Life Comparison Assignment

Explore modern, real-life parallels from around the world using this comparison activity for Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery! Students will compare the conformity, superstition, and blind tradition in this short story with six unique rituals from around the world. This assignment encourages students to think critically about cultural practices and what society accepts as “normal.” By analyzing The Lottery alongside real-world examples, students can better understand Jackson’s commentary on how traditions persist even when they no longer serve a moral or logical purpose. It’s a meaningful way to connect literature to contemporary social studies and ethics discussions.

5. Compare and Contrast Activity: “The Lottery” vs. The Hunger Games

This compare and contrast assignment challenges students to examine how both The Lottery and The Hunger Games explore themes of tradition, control, violence, and individual agency. Students will explore text evidence, plot structure, and overarching themes to practice comparing and contrasting these two dystopian texts. This activity is ideal for classes studying genre, theme development, or power structures in literature. By aligning The Lottery with a modern YA text like The Hunger Games, students can see how dystopian warnings evolve across generations while sharpening their analytical and comparative writing skills.

6. Netflix Adaptation Assignment

This creative project invites students to reimagine any short story or novel as a Netflix series. By combining literary analysis with real-world media design, students explore character development, theme, genre, and narrative structure while crafting their own adaptation. While this assignment is adaptable, it works especially well for The Lottery. Students can conceptualize how the chilling tone, themes of societal violence, and character arcs would translate into a visual, episodic format. It promotes critical thinking and media literacy, all while fostering engagement through creativity. Consider using this as a capstone project following your The Lottery unit.

7. Jeopardy Review Game

This Jeopardy-style review game offers an engaging way to revisit key concepts from The Lottery! Designed to promote active recall and literary analysis, the game challenges students across six categories: Characters, Setting, Plot Details, Symbols & Themes, Quotes & Dialogue, and higher-order thinking in Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy rounds. Perfect for test prep, group review, or just reinforcing key ideas in a fun and collaborative format, this review game ensures students can demonstrate their understanding of The Lottery in an interactive way. It’s ideal for both in-person and online learning environments.

8. “The Lottery” Editable Test Question Bank – Summative Assessment

These editable test questions for Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery can be used as a final assessment for your short story unit. Assess students’ comprehension, understanding, and higher-level thinking skills using these question prompts. With a mix of multiple-choice, short-answer, and extended-response formats, the assessment aligns with Common Core and encourages students to engage with key ideas, literary devices, and thematic development in The Lottery. Because the question bank is fully editable, you can customize it to suit your classroom’s needs, whether you want to emphasize plot understanding, analysis, or argumentative writing.

✨ Kindly note that due to copyright restrictions, these resources are not editable, except for the files specifically labelled as editable. This is a common practice within the online marketplace in order to protect the clip artists and software providers that have authorized their intellectual property for the development of this resource.

See what other teachers are saying about this The Lottery Short Story Unit:

“Great resource to supplement my existing activities for this short story. Students enjoyed the activities. Everything I have purchased from this provider has been good quality.”

– Ben L.

⭒ For classrooms utilizing Google Classroom® ⭒

To access the digital version of these worksheets, simply follow the instructions within the resource to copy the files directly to your Google Drive®.