Classroom Strategies
The House on Mango Street is told through small vignettes. One of the major challenges I face in teaching this book is that the positive outcome is not revealed until the end of the book. While the vignettes are intertwined and there is a consistency of characters, it is not a typical chapter book that builds on itself. Some of the vignettes, while entertaining, do not have a common theme with others. Structuring the book in terms of lessons around themes ends up being slightly difficult if I were to have the students read The House on Mango Street straight through. While I will be having the students read the book in a somewhat linear fashion, it will not be page for page— the book is not structured in a way that requires this.
While the themes of the book can be complex, the language it is written in is relatively straightforward, something struggling readers can still have success with. It is also an easy book to differentiate instruction with; depending on the student group, the book may be read in its entirety while other students may just focus on vignettes necessary to the theme of the unit. Some vignettes will be read and discussed together as a class, while other sections will be split up into groups and presented. I do not anticipate having more than a class set of books, so the majority of reading will take place in the classroom and homework assignments will build off the themes discussed in the class. Supplemental texts are shorter and will be provided as copies.
While reading is the main student activity throughout the unit, the teacher plays the role of the initiator of conversation through the Socratic Method around each of the reading themes. The different themes will each take several days to be addressed and will include conversation with the students. There will be formative assessments within each theme to allow students to express their feelings on the issue or to state what they have learned. The unit will also have three summative assessments discussed later.
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