Reading for meaning: Ten Minutes' Musing by Alice Dunbar Nelson

Reading for meaning: Ten Minutes' Musing by Alice Dunbar Nelson

warning

These resources will be removed by end of Summer Term 2025.

Switch to our new teaching resources now - designed by teachers and leading subject experts, and tested in classrooms.

Lesson details

Key learning points

  1. In this lesson, we will read a short story called 'Ten Minutes' Musing' by Alice Dunbar Nelson, who was among the African American writers whose artistic talents sparked the Harlem Renaissance. Today, we will develop our skills with comprehension and reading for meaning.

Licence

This content is made available by Oak National Academy Limited and its partners and licensed under Oak’s terms & conditions (Collection 1), except where otherwise stated.

Loading...

8 Questions

Q1.
What was the name of the literary movement which Virginia Woolf belonged to?
Correct answer: modernism
post-modernism
romanticism
structuralism
Q2.
Which is the correct definition of the word "subvert"?
hide underneath something
return to something
Correct answer: undermine an established system
Q3.
How does Virginia Woolf subvert some of the expectations of a ghost story?
Correct answer: The ghosts do not seem threatening because they are focused on their love.
The setting is eerie and mysterious.
There are no ghosts in the story.
Q4.
True or false? A short story is a novel that is incomplete.
Correct answer: false
true
Q5.
True or false? Short stories are always simple.
Correct answer: false
true
Q6.
True or false? Short stories have a fully developed theme but are shorter and less elaborate than a novel.
false
Correct answer: true
Q7.
True or false? The uncanny is an uncomfortable psychological experience where a familiar thing is encountered in an unsettling or eerie context.
false
Correct answer: true
Q8.
True or false? Virginia Woolf wanted her short story to be a comedy.
Correct answer: false
true

5 Questions

Q1.
In the title, Ten Minutes' Musing, what does the word "musing" mean?
laughing
Correct answer: thinking and reflecting
watching a fight
Q2.
What kind of narrator is used in the story?
Correct answer: a first-person narrator
a second-person narrator
a third-person narrator
Q3.
What is the occupation of the narrator in the story?
doctor
Correct answer: teacher
writer
Q4.
Alice Dunbar Nelson was a writer and part of a cultural and artistic movement called...
The African American Renaissance
Correct answer: The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Writers
The Renaissance
Q5.
Which of the following themes do you think the short story, Ten Minutes' Musing explores?
family
greed
human nature
love
Correct answer: power
revenge

Lesson appears in

UnitEnglish / The Short Story

English