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.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Christmas with the Fairbanks

When we wake up, we stay upstairs.  We don’t go down to immediately start opening presents, we don’t even go down to peek at them.  We stay upstairs, shielding our eyes from what might be waiting in the living room.  When all twelve of us (four sons, four daughters, a dad, a mom, a wife of a son, a niece, and a nephew) are awake, then we can start opening our gifts.  On each present, there is a little tag with the name of who it’s for, and a number.  That number represents how big and important the present is.  Number one is the biggest present, and the higher the number the smaller the present.  We all sit down, gather our presents, and open them up.

We all go around the room, opening our gift with the highest number, all the way down to number one. Number one.  That special gift, that everyone spends all Christmas waiting to open.  Last year, it was a phone.  My older sister got tickets to her favorite band.  My little brother got the awesome toy dinosaur he’s been talking all year about.

Then there's the “ho-ho-ho” present (as we call it).  You can immediately tell which one is your ho-ho-ho present.  It has the same wrapping paper every year, and every year a different note is written on it by the real “Santa Claus”.  When I was a little kid, I didn’t care about any other presents, no matter what they were.  Except for my ho-ho-ho present.  In that five year old mind, the most exciting thing in the world was thinking that Santa Claus, all the way up in the north pole, had his elves make that present just for me.

~ Kristen F.

3 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 9, 2015 at 12:46 PM

    I like how your paragraphs flow together well and how you do not use the rules for writing, you make your own rules.

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 9, 2015 at 12:49 PM

    I love how you explained the anticipation about going downstairs for the presents. The ho-ho-ho present was the cutest part and it's such a neat tradition. Your writing also flows really nicely together.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJanuary 9, 2015 at 12:52 PM

    I love how you tell a really strong story and incorporated different memories into it. The story flows from one part to another really well and I loved the last paragraph.

    ReplyDelete

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