Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. How do you mark the passage of time? Do you count weeks, months, seasons, years? What are some other ways to mark time or talk about how much time has passed that you have heard of or learned about—either from ancient societies, your family culture, or cultures other than your own?

Teaching Suggestion: Throughout the novel, Esperanza refers to time based on what fruits or vegetables are in season while she works at the company camp. This is a change from her normal way of counting years, and it is deeply embedded in the structure of the novel. This question is meant to engage students in some outside-the-box thinking about time and changes over time. Students who need some prompting to think about this question might benefit from the resources below.

• WorldAtlas’s “Calendars Used Around the World” discusses nine different calendars around the world and briefly explains their origins.
• “A Walk Through Time - Ancient Calendars” via The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explains the evolution of the way people have told time over the ages.