SANDRA CISNEROS' SHORT STORY, "ELEVEN": MORE ACTIVITIES

MORE ACTIVITIES FOR SANDRA CISNEROS' SHORT STORY, "ELEVEN"

Can you make these activities more creative without changing the focus? If you think they are too challenging, how would you tweak them so that your seventh graders are able to understand the tasks and perform them?

A. Plot Details

When you summarize a story, you note the most important events and details. Summarize the story in your own words. Write out the events in the order they happen.

B. Character Analysis

Rachel is the main character of the story. How do the following things give us clues about her personality? Rachel’s words, actions, reactions, feelings, movements, thoughts, mannerisms

C. Setting

What are the clues that tell you when and where the story takes place? How does the setting influence the story’s conflict and resolution?

D. Figurative Language

Identify TWO similes Rachel uses when she describes the sweater. Explain the two things that are being compared. What do these comparisons tell you about how Rachel feels about the sweater?

E. Point of View

Whose point of view is used to tell the story? How do you know it’s the first person point of view? In stories using first person point of view, the narrator’s words reveal his or her own personality. How does Rachel reveal the type of person she is through what she says?

F. Diction/Imagery/Word Usage

Identify the words that describe the sweater. How do the words describing the sweater help you understand how Rachel feels? What images do these words create?

G. Symbolism

Sometimes a character makes special connections with images in a story. Here are three different images Rachel focuses on near the end of “Eleven”. What are the connections Rachel makes with them? In other words, what do they symbolize to her?

A red sweater: being singled out; unfairness

A birthday party: unhappiness, disappointment

A runaway balloon: escape, being unnoticed

H. Themes

A theme is a main or central idea, concern or purpose in a literary work. It is a "big" statement that a piece of literature makes about particular subjects. Works can have many subjects and many themes and both are open to interpretation. It is best to express a theme in a full sentence. Some subjects of “Eleven” are growing up, childhood and the influence people’s experiences have on them. Sometimes a good way of determining a theme of a story is to ask: What lessons do the characters learn?

What are TWO lessons Rachel learns?