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’ll cheer her on every step of the way while learning more about American history.
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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 of pages to read aloud before beginning our discussion.
Esperanza’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 and relating them to our students’ personal experiences is a great way to start classroom discussions. These open-ended topics not only assess 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 encounter.
Instead of memorizing a list of vocabulary words from the novel, I like context clue worksheets that require students to go back into the text and decipher what a word means. Using context clues is an important skill my students 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 includes all the essential reading comprehension components, plus some additional engagement 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
I hope you found a few ideas here to 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…
