Week 3: Jacqueline Woodson

Week 3: College Reading and Writing: Suffolk County House of Corrections at South Bay

Jacqueline Woodson: Annotating, Summarizing, Imitating, Analyzing

to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better

to summarize: to put something in your own words

to imitate: to create an original piece of writing based on something you have read

to analyze: to consider a question on the text, providing supporting examples from the text

Exercise: Read, annotate, and summarize a poem

1. Read the poem out loud and underline any words you need to look up

2. Write any questions you have in the margins

3. Put tricky sentences into your own words in notes in the margins

4. Write a paragraph summarizing the poem in your own words, with quotations from the poem.

Group Home Before Miss Edna's House              by Jacqueline Woodson

1)The monsters that come at night don't

breathe fire, have two heads or long claws.

The monsters that come at night don't

come bloody and half-dead and calling your name.

They come looking like regular boys

going through your drawers and pockets saying

You better not tell Counselor else I'll beat you down.

The monsters that come at night snatch

the covers off your bed, take your

10)pillow and in the morning

steal your bacon when the cook's back is turned

call themselves The Throwaway Boys, say

You one of us now.

When the relatives stop coming

When you don't know where your sister is anymore

When every sign around you says

Group Home Rules: Don't

do this and don't do that

until it sinks in one rainy Saturday afternoon

20)while you're sitting at the Group Home window

reading a beat-up Group Home book,

wearing a Group Home hand-me-down shirt

hearing all the Group Home loudness, that

you are a Throwaway Boy.

And the news just sits in your stomach

26)hard and heavy as Group Home food.

This poem appears in a book called Locomotion, so the Work Cited page could look like this:

Woodson, Jacqueline. Locomotion. Puffin Books, 2003.

example summary, incorporating quotation and in-text citation: note that the in-text citation covers the lines summarized in the sentence, not just the lines where I took words from the poem.

In her poem "Group Home Before Miss Edna's House," Jacqueline Woodson writes from the perspective of someone living in a "Group Home." The "Throwaway Boys" bully the speaker, taking his personal belongings, bedding, and breakfast (Woodson lines 9-12). After these losses, once "the relatives stop coming," and the speaker doesn't "know where [his] sister is anymore," he realizes that he believes the "Throwaway Boys" were right when they said "you one of us now" (Woodson title, lines 14, 15, 24).

Exercise: Analysis

Question for analysis: The poem equates "regular boys" and "monsters that come at night": what makes these boys monstrous to the speaker?

Exercise: Imitation

Write your own poem about figuring something out.  Include the phrase "you don't know where," specific foods, a window, and "monsters."