Teaching Metacognition Using Short Stories from Sandra Cisneros

We have been explicitly teaching reading strategies for the past few weeks. We always end our unit with a summative assessment utilizing “Salvador Late or Early” from Sandra Cisneros. We find the short story offers so much rich text to be analyzed and interpreted. Students can make several inferences and also feel confident in their exploration of the text.  However, this year we knew our students would need a lot more practice in closely reading a text. For our formative assessments, we decided to use two other texts by Sandra Cisneros that focus on identity. We have always used the text “My Name” as our formative assessment, but this year we also added the text “Hairs.”

When we read “My Name” and “Hairs,” both from House on Mango Street, we teach our students how to closely read the text, and we also teach our students all about metacognition… you know…the process of thinking about our thinking. Students connect with both texts on such a personal level that there is always more than enough inferences, connections, and questions that can be made, discussed, and analyzed when reading. While “My Name” provides an opportunity to connect with the text through our given names and our name origin stories, “Hairs"  provides an even deeper connection for our students. Everyone has a relationship with their hair, whether it is good or bad. 

We ended up finding and adapting this awesome lesson online by EL.Literature and used it as a starting point for our formative assessment on “Hairs.” It breaks down the short story into bite sized chunks and provides opportunities for rich discussion and interpretation. Our students had no problems finding many connections to the text. While they had some problems determining the importance in other texts, this was the first text that the idea of determining the importance of parts of the text clicked. Student inferences were rich and developed, and they also did a great job finding the evidence to support their inferences. (There’s that determining importance again, am I right?) 

Student Example

Teaching “My Name” and “Hairs” as formative assessments before we ended our unit with our summative assessment on “Salvador Late or Early” had such a profound effect on our students’ abilities to interpret a text that we knew we just had to share this lesson idea with you all. Now that we are moving on to our memoir unit, we can really see the benefits of spending just a little bit more time closely reading rich texts and practicing metacognition. Our students feel much more confident approaching unfamiliar texts, and they are able to apply the strategies that they learned during the first month of school to fictional as well as informational texts. This is a win-win situation for us! Remember National Hispanic Heritage Month is 9/15- 10/15, so we always plan this lesson around this time of year.