Summer on Wheels by Gary Soto is a great book for students to read in the ESL or Spec Ed classroom.

Hector and Mando are bored, so they embark on a bike-riding adventure.  Along the way, they get paid to be in a Band-aid commercial, perform in a rap recording, help Aunt Teresa paint a mural.  They meet all kinds of people and eat numerous types of food.  This is a light-hearted book, very useful for reader comprehension.  It's also full of simlies and metaphors that young people "get."     

I've found this to be a reader-friendly book for all the cultures I teach.  So far, we've created character webs.  Gary Soto describes his characters vividly, so this was simple for the students.  We also made plot diagrams.