Page 43 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade6_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 1.4
continued
personal Narrative:
Incident-response-reflection
voodoo: religion practiced in Haiti involving spells and spirits of the dead
radioactive: containing powerful, dangerous radiation energy
my Notes
10 When I grew up, I became a writer. I discovered a particular pleasure in going on risky adventures. I wrote about my real-life adventures for national magazines: I spent four months riding with New York firefighters and running into burning buildings
with them. I spent six months riding with New York homicide cops as they chased and captured drug dealers and murderers. I flew upside-down over the Pacific Ocean with a stunt pilot in an open-cockpit airplane. I took part in dangerous voodoo ceremonies in Haiti. I spent time on a tiger ranch in Texas and learned to tame two-hundred-pound tigers by yelling “No!” and smacking them hard on the nose. I found that tigers were not much different from the bullies of my childhood in Chicago.
11 I also wrote fiction. I created entire worlds and filled them with people I wanted to put in there. I made these people do and say whatever it pleased me to have them do and say. In the worlds I made up, I was all-powerful—I had superpowers.
12 I began writing a series of children’s books called The Zack Files, about a boy named Zack who keeps stumbling into the supernatural. In many of these books I gave Zack temporary powers—to read minds, to travel outside his body, to travel back into the past, to triumph over ghosts and monsters. I created another series called Maximum Boy, about a boy named Max who accidentally touches radioactive rocks that just came back from outer space and who suddenly develops superpowers. Maximum Boy is me as a kid in Chicago, but with superpowers.
13 Oh yeah, I almost forgot. In The Zack Files, I created a fat, stupid kid who sweats a lot and thinks he’s cool, but who everyone laughs at behind his back. You know what I named this fool? Vernon Manteuffel. I do hope the real Vernon knows.
Second Read
• Reread the narrative to answer these text-dependent comprehension questions.
• Write any additional questions you have about the text in your Reader/Writer
Notebook.
1. Key Ideas and Details: What details from the story tell you how the incident of bullying the narrator describes is different from the usual bullying he experiences?
2. Craft and Structure: Why did Greenburg name his series Maximum Boy? Make an inference about what the word maximum means? Use context clues to check your inference. What does it tell you about the series?
16 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 6
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