Become a more confident language teacher.
You know a novel is great when you can’t escape it on the Internet. Whether you read my blog, Kristy Placido’s blog, Sharon Birch’s blog, Profe Hanson’s blog, you’ve surely heard of Esperanza. Written by Carol Gaab, it is the real-life story of a woman who flees Guatemala with her family to escape political persecution. They immigrate to…
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After reading Esperanza with my classes last year, I’ve been meaning to work up some more resources on Central American ‘Chicken Buses’. My kids enjoyed learning about them so much! It took awhile for me to find good video resources on them (there are a lot of low-quality ‘home videos’), but I got there! This song is…
Read MoreThe Immigrant Archive Project is a really neat website that I found through the Esperanza Teacher’s Guide. It contains pages upon pages of videos of immigrants to the United States telling their stories. The possibilities for classroom use of this site are endless! The activity that is published in Chapter 9 of the Esperanza’s Teacher’s…
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To begin, students made predictions as to how the novel would end. They wrote them on scrap slips of paper and turned them in, and I shared them with the class. We discussed the before-reading discussion questions from the Teacher’s Guide. I read the chapter aloud to my students, and they followed along in their…
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We began with the Immigrant Archive Project activity from the Teacher’s Guide. The activity is AWESOME, and my students loved exploring more biographies on their own. Just beware that the site has changed since the guide was published, and there is now a search feature AND Augusto Francisco’s biography is no longer on the site.…
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Discuss the before-reading discussion questions in the Teacher’s Guide Read the story aloud as students listen. As they listen, have them draw murals to map out the action and locations in this chapter. Next, have them put their murals aside and read the chapter in a small group. With their small group, have students complete…
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If you haven’t already, now is a great time to use MovieTalk with the music video “A las tres” by los Enanitos. I made a reusable set of the “¿Quién lo dijo o lo hizo?” cards from the Teacher’s Guide, along with a set of character names for each set of cards. Students completed the…
Read MoreThis is a beautiful, sad song about the life of an immigrant that lives and works alone (presumably in the US) for many years to provide for his wife and son that live in another country. The music video, as you can see, tells the story visually even without understanding the lyrics, and so it…
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WOh me oh my I’ve gotten behind on my blogging! Here are the plans that I used for Esperanza Chapters 4-6: Esperanza, Chapter 4 Family trees We interpreted these two examples of Esperanza’s family tree and my own family tree as an expansion of the pre-reading activity found in the Teacher’s Guide. Students create their own family…
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Here is an outline of my lesson plans for Chapter 3 of Esperanza: Read the article about strikes from the Teacher’s Guide, and discuss it and justice using the questions provided. We did not do the protest poster activity outlined in the Guide. We listened to “La llamada” by Selena and completed the activity described…
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