Lesson 4

Lesson Goals

Texts

Optional

• • Excerpts from The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros, Vintage Books, 2009

Materials

Tools

• Mentor Sentence Journal

• Working with Mentor Sentences Tool

Question Sets

• Telling Stories: Section 1 Lesson 4 Question Set

Editable Google Docs

• Mentor Sentence Journal

• Telling Stories: Section 1 Lesson 4 Question Set

• Working with Mentor Sentences Tool

Activity 1: Read – Discuss

We will do a first reading of a short narrative excerpt by Sandra Cisneros, looking for what it says about storytelling and how it uses language to convey its meaning.

Follow along as your teacher introduces San Antonio resident and author Sandra Cisneros, whose primary work, The House on Mango Street, is a collection of short-story vignettes that reflect her personal and cultural experiences and are told in a voice that echoes the traditions of oral storytelling.

Your teacher will identify two excerpts from Sandra Cisneros’s introductory memoir "A House of My Own." Read and annotate the two short passages, considering the following guiding questions:

1. In the first excerpt, what do we learn that the young woman in the photo thinks about stories and her intentions as a storyteller?

2. As you read the two excerpts, what do you notice about the author’s use of language and how the structure of her sentences shifts? Provide specific examples of the author’s use of language and sentence syntax from the text.

Participate in a class discussion about what you and other students notice about the ideas and use of language in the two excerpts.

Activity 2: Read – Discuss

We will learn about, identify, and discuss the two grammatical shifts that occur in this narrative passage (and the overall text): from third to first person and from present to past verb tenses.

Step 1

Follow along as your teacher presents information about pronoun usage and its relationship to the concept of narrative point of view.

Reread the two excerpts, looking for the place where the person and point of viewshift from third ("she") to first ("I").

Compare your thinking with that of a reading partner.

Step 2

As a class, discuss the following question:

1. Why might Sandra Cisneros have chosen first to tell her story of "the young woman in the photo" in third person before shifting to first person? What evidence from the text offers the strongest support for this interpretation?

Follow along as your teacher presents information about tense and its relationship to the development of a story’s plot and timeframe.

Reread the two excerpts, looking for the place where the verb tense shifts from present to past tense.

Step 3

In a class discussion, compare what you notice with other students’ answers. Then discuss the following question:

1. Why might Sandra Cisneros have chosen first to discuss what "the young woman in the photo… wantsto write" in present tense, then shift to past tense when she discusses "the people I wrote about"?

Activity 3: Discuss – Read – Write

We will review the grammatical concepts of sentences and fragments and look for examples of Cisneros’s intentional use of fragments in her narrative. We will then rewrite the fragments as complete sentences.

Step 1

Follow along as your teacher reviews the grammatical concepts of sentences and sentence fragments and the distinctions between them.

Focus on and discuss what Cisneros seems to be saying at the start of the third paragraph in the first excerpt: "She experiments…snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses."

Reread the passage, looking for the two places in which Cisneros has chosen to use a fragment rather than a grammatically complete sentence.

Step 2

As a class, compare what you notice, and then discuss the following question:

1. Why might Cisneros have chosen to write these two "sentences" as fragments?

Rewrite and "correct" the two fragments by making them grammatically complete or connecting them to another complete sentence.

Compare your revisions with those of a reading partner.

Activity 4: Read – Discuss – Write

We will examine one key sentence from the first excerpt, discussing how it uses parallelism and repetition to connect its ideas and images. We will then practice writing a similar sentence that we might use in our own narratives.

Step 1

Reread the first sentence in the first excerpt, considering the following question:

1. Following the main clause of the second sentence ("She wants to write stories that ignore borders"), what word and grammatical structure is repeated?

Follow along as your teacher reviews the sentence structure and the rhetorical concepts of parallelism and repetition.

Discuss the following questions:

2. What five "opposites" has Cisneros linked through the use of parallelism and the repetition of the preposition "between"?

3. Why might Cisneros have chosen to use parallelism and repetition in this particular sentence?

Using this sentence as a model, write a sentence with a similar structure that might be used in your narrative.

Compare your sentence with that of a reading partner.

Step 2

As you continue to read the texts in this unit, use your Mentor Sentence Journal to identify sentences that stand out to you as interesting or that represent a strong example of a particular concept you have learned. You can use these sentences to build a writer’s toolbox, wherein you have a number of techniques at your disposal to use when writing.

Activity 5: Read – Write

We will learn about the grammatical concept of a participial phrase and examine how Cisneros uses participial phrases to build a rich sentence from a simple main clause. We will then practice writing a similar sentence that we might use in our own narratives.

Step 1

Follow along as your teacher explains what a participle is and how participlescan be used to create participial phrases that can be used as modifiers.

Reread the first excerpt, looking for a sentence in which Cisneros uses participial phrases.

Step 2

Compare what you find with a reading partner. Read the sentence aloud and listen to its rhythms, and then work together to respond to the following questions:

1. Consider the simple base of the example sentence: "She experiments." What do you know and not know from this two-word clause?

2. What are the participles that introduce phrases that follow and build upon this clause? What effect do these words by themselves have on you as a reader?

3. What do the phrases that these participles introduce tell you about how and why the author "experiments"?

Compare your thinking with that of other reading pairs in a class discussion.

Step 3

Using this sentence as a model, write a sentence with a similar structure that might be used in your narrative.

Compare your sentence with that of your reading partner.