Page 91 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade6_Flipbook

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CTIvITy .14
a day of Change: developing the Story
LearNING STraTeGIeS:
Group Discussion, Graphic Organizer
About the Author
Sandra Cisneros grew up in Chicago and now lives in San Antonio, Texas. One of her best-known novels, The House on Mango Street, reveals the life of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. In talking about her writing, Cisneros says she creates stories from things that have touched her deeply; “ . . . in real life a story doesn’t have shape, and it’s the writer that gives it a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Short Story
my Notes
Learning Targets
• Analyze how conflicts in a story advance the plot’s rising action and climax.
Preview
In this activity, you will read a short story and analyze how conflict advances the plot.
Setting a Purpose for Reading
• As you read this short story, mark the elements of exposition (setting, character, and initial conflict) and the major events in the story.
• Circle unknown words and phrases. Try to determine the meaning of the words by using context clues, word parts, or a dictionary.
Grammar USaGe
Pronouns
Indefinite pronouns refer
to nonspecific persons
or things. In this excerpt, Rachel mentions everybody, somebody, nobody. These indefinite pronouns refer to people who are not specific named.
Eleven
from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, by Sandra Cisneros
1 What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is
that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.
2 Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.
3 Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
4 You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.
64 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 6
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