Silent Reading Record

Read for 30 minutes and then stop and complete the following:

1. What did you read? (Include title and page numbers .)
--I read Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson from page 1 to page 57.

2. In four or more sentences summarize what you read.
--Frannie is a young 11-year-old girl living in the seventies. She reads Emily Dickenson's poem in school and starts to ponder the meaning of the "thing with feathers": hope. A new boy comes into her class and he is white but claims not to be. All of the kids call him Jesus-boy. When he makes eye contact with Frannie, he always seems to smile and she doesn't know why. Most of the other kids in class pick and taunt him, claiming he should be living on the other side of the highway with the other white folk.

Frannie's other brother, Sean, is deaf so he goes to a different school. Frannie admires her brother and wishes girls could see past his hearing problems. She thinks he would have lots of different girl friends if he could hear properly. Her mother has been sad before because of the loss of a daughter and another miscarriage. When Frannie returns home from school one day, her mother is in bed and Frannie is instantly worried. When her father gets home, he informs Sean and Frannie that their mother is pregnant again and that is why she is tired.

3. As you were reading, what were you thinking? Write at least four sentences. Did you make any connections? What were you wondering? What opinions do you have about what you read?
--When I started reading this book, I thought there would be more direct references to the Vietnam, War because of what the back of the book has said. Instead, (so far) it focuses more on the realities of segregation through the eyes of a young girl. I have enjoyed the "reverse racism" perspective the book provides. The "Jesus-Boy" is a white boy in an all black school and is harassed to go back to the other side of the highway. The bully, Trevor, is lighter black than the other kids with piercing blue eyes. Rumors say that his father is a white man but he is so mean to the other students no one will ask him or talk about it. The entire time, I was thinking of the movie Ruby. Ruby is a story about the first African-American girl to be bused to a white school through desegregation. The realities and the treatment of Ruby and "Jesus- boy" is extremely similar.

I am wondering if I need to investigate into the opposition around the Vietnam War in an effort to draw more connections to the text. I was also wondering if I needed to look into people with disabilities and how they were treated during the seventies.

So far I have truly enjoyed the book. I can relate to Frannie in a number of ways. At one point, Frannie says, "Some days, eleven felt like a whole long lifetime. All heavy like that" (19).