Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan makes an excellent whole-class novel study for ELA teachers in grades 5-7. Your students will love reading about Esperanza's adventure from a wealthy Mexican landowner to a poor immigrant worker. They will be cheering her on every step of the way as they learn a bit about our American history.
If you are teaching this book to your class, here are a few activities to include in your Esperanza Rising novel study that will help your students connect with the characters and storyline. All of these activities are included in my PDF novel unit, available on TPT.
Daily Lesson Planning
I like to lead off our daily novel work with questions and discussion from the assigned reading selection. For my favorite chapters, I highlight a couple pages to read aloud before beginning our discussion.
Experanza's life at each point in the story is much different than anything my students have experienced. Reviewing the setting and character interactions within our reading selection relate to our students' personal experiences is a great way to start classroom discussions. These types of open-ended topics not only give you an assessment of comprehension, but they also help students hear how their peers interpret and connect to the story.
Character Analysis
The relationship between Esperanza and the other characters in the book offers plenty of opportunity to teach more in-depth character analysis themes to your students. The theme of perseverance through change is evident throughout the story, and middle school readers should be able to identify how the characters change during Esperanza's journey.
Vocabulary and Word Work
One of my favorite parts of teaching this novel is how the mix of historical and cultural references influences the vocabulary your students will gain exposure to.
As an alternative to memorizing a list of vocabulary words from the novel, I like to utilize context clue worksheets that require them to go back into the text and decipher what a word means. The ability to use context clues is an important skill that they need to practice for state testing.
My novel study also includes a personification worksheet. With this, students have to explain the meaning of the underlined sentence and why it is an example of personification.
More Ideas for Esperanza Rising
In addition to the activities I highlighted above, my Esperanza Rising Novel Study features all of the essential reading comprehension components as well as some other engaging activities. Here is the full list…
- Chapter-by-Chapter Lesson Plans
- Chapter-by-Chapter Reader Response Questions
- Character Analysis Worksheet
- Story Map Activity
- Character Trading Cards: End of Novel Activity
- Teacher Answer Key
Hopefully you found a few ideas here that will help you read this book with your class. Again, the combination of perseverance, historical references, and cultural diversity makes this a great whole-class novel study. Check out the following links for more examples of novel study activities I use with my middle school students…
