Potomac's eighth grade English students read and discuss The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The book is a series of short vignettes that together capture the characters, setting, and stories of a particular neighborhood in Chicago. The vignettes are written from the perspective of a fictional narrator and are based loosely on Cisneros's own experiences as well as those of her students. Some of the vignettes are humorous or action-packed; some are heart-wrenching or shocking. All are deliberate in their use of figurative language, poetic elements, grammar conventions, and pacing.Each eighth grader composed at least one vignette for inclusion in this digital collection. They wrote in the style of Sandra Cisneros, as they interpreted it based on their notes and our class discussions, yet they set it in a time and place of their own choosing. While some of these vignettes are based on the author's personal experience, many of them are purely fiction, an imagining of characters and circumstances that seemed ripe for this assignment. Students also used this assignment to experiment with new vocabulary words and techniques involving punctuation and sentence structure.We encourage you to leave comments below vignettes that strike you in some way. Please keep your comments positive and specific; this is not the place for critiques or suggestions. Enjoy the creativity and vibrancy of these students' literary efforts.
Earthquake
One day my cousins and I were rock climbing in Great Falls. It was a hot day so we were all sweating a lot so we kept dipping our heads in the water. It felt like we were plunging into a freezing pool. We then looked for a next climb. We found a really big rock that was perfect for climbing so of course we all started climbing it. It was a very tall rock with very few spots to hold on to. My hands were greasy with sweat but then when we were about ⅔ of the way up we felt a slight rumble in the ground. Me and my cousin Casey were climbing next to each other and we both looked at each other bewildered. We had no idea what it could have been. For some reason we kept climbing and we made it to the top. A few minutes later when we went back down to the water to look for our water bottles that we set on a rock a man on a kayak came by. He asked us, with a crazy look on his face, why we were still climbing and we didn't know what he meant. He then told us there had been a small earthquake.
~ Brendan A.
I like how you described the earthquake as a small rumble and you and your cousins didn't know what happened, but then the man said it was an earthquake which made the rumble seem a lot scarier
ReplyDelete^ I agree! Nice job! :)
ReplyDeleteNice use of the word bewildered.
ReplyDelete