March 11, 2009

Today we started on The House on Mango Street. The warm-up was as follows:

How do you feel about your name? Is there a story behind it? What is its history? Do you know what it means? Do you like it? Hate it? Would you change it if you could? To what? Why?

As students were working on the warm-up, the Nature Writing Portfolios were collected. After this, I gave a short introduction of the book by starting with asking the students to breifly look through the book and then talk to someone next to them about what they observed in the book. We discussed how vignettes work and how this book is a collection of vignettes put together in a memoir. We read the first vignette that has the same name as the book, and then did an exercise that which will be the first entry in their dialectical journal. The prompts were as such:

1. How does Esperanza feel about the house she lives in? Why
2. Quote at least 3 examples of figurative language (e.g. simile, metaphor, personification, etc.) from this chapter.
3. Respond to this chapter personally in some way. What questions does it raise? What associations (thoughts) does it call up? What is your favorite line? Why?

The final piece of the day was reading the fourth vignette, titled "My Name." After this, the students were handed a green piece of paper with the instructions of what to do which were prompts about their names. Please see the handouts bin in the classroom if you did not get this paper.

Homework: My Name handout and finish the poem questions from yesterday's poem "Sonrisas."