Page 54 - SpringBoard_ELD_Grade6_Flipbook

Interpret the Text using Close Reading
Learning Target
• Apply understanding of how short stories are structured to comprehending the text.
Read and annotate
Read “Eleven” and annotate the text as you read.
■ Use the My Notes area to write questions or ideas you have about the story. ■ Underline examples of repetition.
■ Put a star next to the conflicts that occur in the short story.
■ Circle unknown words and phrases.
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.
5 Only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. Today I wish I was one hundred and two instead of eleven because if I was one hundred and two I’d have known what to say when Mrs. Price put the red sweater on my desk. I would’ve known how to tell her it wasn’t mine instead of just sitting there with that look on my face and nothing coming out of my mouth.
6 “Whose is this?” Mrs. Price says, and she holds the red sweater up in the air for all the class to see. “Whose? It’s been sitting in the coatroom for a month.”
7 “Not mine,” says everybody. “Not me.”
ACTIVITY 3.3
My Notes
Short Story
Unit 1 • Stories of Change • Part 3: Eleven 31
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