Living Up The Street

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

Activity 1: Writing like a Writer: Revising for Imagery and Descriptive Language

Review your personal/cultural/family money and labor biography. Find one memory or one moment that you can describe in extensive detail. Describe the memory with as much detail as possible; include an explanation of what you learned about money, wealth, and labor as a result of that memory. 

• Good descriptive writing speaks to as many of the five senses as possible. As a pre-writing activity, make a list of every detail you remember using the five senses as a guide. Then, see how many of those details you can fit into your final piece of writing.

Teaching Suggestion: Consider selecting one of Soto’s essays or another piece of descriptive writing as a model. Encourage students to use as many of the five senses as possible to complete their writing. Students may choose to explain the lesson from the memory at the beginning or end of the text. Encourage them to experiment with sequence, details, and figurative language.

Activity 2: Writing Like a Writer: Explanation by Omission

In his memoirs, Gary Soto often avoids explicit writing, leaving out emotions, opinions, and lessons learned. He conveys meaning and message indirectly through details, images, dialogue, and reactions. Try your hand at writing a short narrative in the same vein. 

• As a pre-writing activity, decide what message you want to convey. Write it in a sentence or two (e.g., “Hard work pays off” or “I learned how to share in the bouncy house at my fifth birthday”).
• After you determine the message you want to convey, choose a memory (or make up a story) to compose as a narrative. In your narrative writing, convey the message without ever stating it explicitly. Readers should be able to read your story and know what the message is from the details, characters, setting, and your (or the main character’s) actions.
• Like Soto, your writing should include some poetic technique. Experiment with figurative language and imagery. Make a list of details that will help you add color to your story.

·        Write, revise, and edit your narrative; consider utilizing peer critique circles as time allows.

Teaching Suggestion: Story 5 (“Deceit”) or Story 7 (“The Beauty Contest”) serve as good models for students to dissect before writing their own narratives. Read or review one of the stories to have students determine Soto’s underlying messages. Students might highlight which details show Soto’s messages. Consider prompting students with habits of character, such as empathy, cooperation, perseverance, etc. Students can use these words to brainstorm what they’ve learned or what they believe about these ideas, focusing on how to convey that message in narrative form. 

Activity 3: Television and Cinematic Study

Many of Soto’s stories feature cinematic elements. Choose one story or excerpt from a story and detail the ways in which it resembles the plot of a half-hour sitcom, much like the ones Soto may have watched in his youth.

• As a pre-writing activity, watch 2-3 episodes of a half-hour sitcom from any era that features children or young adults as main characters. You might watch a few episodes from the same show or choose 2-3 different shows. Analyze the episodes for narrative structure, character tropes, and comedic elements.
• Consider the formulaic plot structure, the types of characters that recur, and the ways the writers evoke humor.
• In a journal-entry style brief composition, analyze the ways in which your choice of Soto’s stories befits the sitcom observations you made.

Teaching Suggestion: Consider assigning TV shows as student homework and complete the writing exercise in class. A whole group pre-reading activity could involve students discussing the writing elements they identified in the sitcoms. If students need direction, ABC sitcoms from the late 2010s to early 2020s provide good contemporary examples to use for this exercise: Modern Family and Blackish are both substantive examples that might work well for this exercise.