Rationale

The House on Mango Street

Grades: 9, 10

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is a beautifully written collection of vignettes from the life of a young Mexican-American living in downtown Chicago. Although the novel is short and uses simple vocabulary, it also addresses many themes and issues that are best suited for a mature audience, preferably ninth or tenth grade. The format for the novel is unconventional, advanced, and almost poetic in nature.

This novel is pertinent to the lives of adolescents and introduces important character lessons and values to students. The core curriculum states that character development is an important part of reading and analyzing texts for this age group. This novel presents countless opportunities for students to practice and hone their academic stills of reading, discussing, and writing, as they evaluate different issues that pertain to character development. Current issues such as tradition, drugs, friends, abuse, hope, puberty, money, independence, and fear are all themes of this novel.

Using the strategies prepared for this novel students will draw conclusions, make predictions and inferences in order to synthesize their prior knowledge with new information and ideas from the text. This is a literary text that stands as a model for many kinds of activities.

Most of the strategies will take one class period, and all of them require a variety of tasks and skills from all levels of the thought processes. One of the activities, DRTA, uses the children's book, Fanny's Dream, to build interest in the subject matter and relate the theme of "hope" directly to student's lives. Other lessons require students to ask questions, make decisions based on information from the text, and write their predictions for the future. Many of the strategies can be used at different times in the novel, most will take one full class period.

Below is a list of suggestions and a guide to where they are found in this notebook. Remember that Pre-reading and Post-reading can refer to specific chapters as well as the entire novel. Please see the individual strategy for clarification on when it should be used.

ASSESSMENT
Taxonomy Overview Guide

POST-READING
Problematic Situation

COMPREHENSION
Story Structure Analysis
Bloom's Taxonomy

VOCABULARY
Semantic Feature Analysis

WRITING
Directed Reading Thinking
Biopoem

PRE-READING (novel)
Anticipation Guides
KWHL
Raygor Readability Estimate

PRE-READING (chapter)
Cloze Procedure
Guided Imagery

Mollie Weir, 2000