Out of My Mind · Garden Heights

Part 8

for Out of My Mind · Part 8 · Chapters 30–33

8 Parts40 min

What Happens in Part 8

The morning after the finals, Melody learns that the Whiz Kids placed ninth. She refuses to hide at home and insists on going to school despite a violent storm. Lightning forces her to use her manual chair and Plexiglas board, leaving her Medi-Talker behind. During the chaotic departure, Penny runs outside. Melody sees her behind the car and kicks, screams, and cries, but her mother mistakes the warning for a tantrum and backs over Penny. Melody’s parents ride to the hospital while Mrs. V stays with Melody, rejects her self-blame, and takes the call saying Penny’s surgery succeeded. At school, Melody confronts Mr. Dimming and the team about leaving her. Connor puts the ninth-place trophy on her tray; Melody laughs, an involuntary movement knocks it down, and it breaks. She says she does not want it and they deserve it. In the final chapter, Penny is home and Melody begins the autobiography Miss Gordon assigned, choosing to tell her own story in her own words.

What We Will Learn

Section	What you will practice
Vocabulary	Crisis and authorship words: urgent, critical, trauma, resilience, agency…
Literary Elements	Climax, resolution, and a title that comes back at the end as a decision
Cross-Curricular	Emergency communication: latency, redundancy, and who gets to tell a life story

Chapter Summary

Ch.	What happens
30	The Storm and the Driveway — the next morning, Melody’s father reports that the Whiz Kids finished ninth. Melody insists on facing school despite a violent storm. Lightning forces her to use her manual chair and Plexiglas board instead of her power chair and Medi-Talker. During a chaotic departure, Penny runs outside; Melody kicks and cries to warn her mother, but the car backs up and strikes Penny.
31	Waiting with Mrs. V — Melody’s parents ride with Penny to the hospital while Mrs. V cares for Melody. Melody blames herself for insisting on school and wishes she had been hurt instead. Mrs. V firmly tells her the accident is not her fault and that her family would miss her terribly. A phone call finally brings relief: Penny has internal injuries and a broken leg, but her surgery succeeded and she will be fine.
32	The Broken Trophy — back at school, Melody recognizes the steady kindness of her H-5 classmates, then confronts the Whiz Kids about leaving her. The students and Mr. Dimming offer excuses, Rose cries, and Connor places their small ninth-place trophy on Melody’s tray. Melody starts laughing; an involuntary movement knocks the trophy down and breaks it. She says she does not want it and that the team deserves it, then leaves.
33	Her Own Words — Melody reflects that she shares many worries with other fifth graders even though her life differs from theirs. Penny is home from the hospital. Mrs. V connects the Medi-Talker to a computer, and Melody begins the autobiography assigned by Miss Gordon. She titles it Out of My Mind and starts with the same thought about thousands of words that opened the novel.

Part 1

Vocabulary

Study 10 key words from Chapters 30–33, then answer each question.

🚑Knowledge Bank · Words for the Fastest Message

Health · Emergency LanguageEmergency systems run on a small, deliberately dull vocabulary, because in a crisis precision beats eloquence. An emergency is a sudden situation in which delay itself causes harm, and a call about one is expected to deliver four things quickly: location, nature, number of people, and current danger. Dispatchers are trained to ask in that order and to repeat what they hear, a practice called read-back, because a message that has merely been sent is not yet a message received. Hospitals sort arrivals by a system called triage, which ranks patients by how soon treatment must begin rather than by who arrived first; a patient whose outcome is still uncertain is described as critical. Communication researchers add one more term that matters for anyone who types or selects in order to speak: latency, the gap between deciding on a message and delivering it. Every device, board, and trained partner in an emergency plan exists to shrink that gap, because the distance between help and harm is often measured in seconds.

urgentadj.Ch.30

Needing action right this second, not later

“An urgent message is worth nothing if it arrives late.”

emergencyn.Ch.30

A sudden dangerous situation that demands immediate action

“Every emergency is a test of how fast a message can travel.”

trauman.Ch.30–31

A severe injury, or a shock the mind keeps replaying afterward

“The trauma of that driveway stayed with her for weeks.”

criticaladj.Ch.31

So serious that the outcome is still uncertain

“Before the hospital calls, Melody fears that Penny’s condition may be critical.”

guiltn.Ch.31

The heavy feeling of having caused harm

“Guilt does not wait for proof that you were at fault.”

reliefn.Ch.31

The release of fear when a danger finally passes

“Relief arrives when Mrs. V hears that Penny’s surgery succeeded.”

resiliencen.Ch.32–33

The ability to recover and keep going after harm

“Resilience is not cheerfulness; it is returning to the work.”

autobiographyn.Ch.33

The story of a life written by the person who lived it

“An autobiography lets the subject choose the first sentence.”

narratev.Ch.33

To tell a story, choosing what to include and in what order

“Whoever narrates gets to decide where the story begins.”

agencyn.Ch.30–33

The power to act and to decide for oneself

“Agency means the choice is yours, not made about you.”

ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.

1The story of a life written by the person who lived it is an ___.Ch.33

2‘Agency’ means the power to act and to decide for oneself.Ch.30–33

3So serious that the outcome is still uncertain describes a patient who is ___.Ch.31

4To ‘narrate’ a story is simply to repeat it exactly as someone else told it.Ch.33

5Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.31

Word choices:emergencyreliefguiltresilience- some words will not be used

The heavy feeling of having caused harm is .

The release of fear when a danger passes is .

6The ability to recover and keep going after harm is ___.Ch.32–33

7A message counts as delivered the moment it is sent, whether or not anyone receives it.Ch.30

8Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.30–33

Word choices:urgentnarrateautobiographytrauma- some words will not be used

A message that needs action right now is .

To tell a story and choose its order is to .

9A sudden dangerous situation that demands immediate action is an ___.Ch.30

10A shock the mind keeps replaying afterward is ___.Ch.30–31

Part 2

Comprehension

Show you understood what happens in Chapters 30–33.

🏠Knowledge Bank · What a Family Carries Home

Psychology · Crisis, Guilt and RecoveryFamilies in a sudden crisis move through a fairly predictable sequence, and knowing it makes these chapters easier to read. The first phase is shock, in which people act efficiently and feel almost nothing; the second is the flood, when the feeling arrives all at once, usually after the danger has already passed. Somewhere in that second phase most people start assigning blame, and psychologists note that the person who assigns the most blame to themselves is frequently the one who had the least control over what happened. The pattern has a name: counterfactual thinking, the mind running the same minute over and over with one detail changed. It is not evidence of fault. It is a mind hunting for a lever it never had. Recovery in families depends far less on finding a culprit than on rebuilding routines — meals, sleep, school, the ordinary scaffolding a crisis knocks down — and researchers who study that return call it not healing but adaptation.

1What result does Melody’s father report the next morning?Ch.30

2What is the weather like around the morning of the accident?Ch.30

3Penny gets outside without the adults in the house realizing it.Ch.30

4Why does Melody not have her Medi-Talker during the driveway emergency?Ch.30

5Write the numbers 1–5 in the boxes to show the correct order of events in Chapters 30–33. Number 1 = what happens first.Ch.30–33

Mrs. V receives word that Penny’s surgery succeeded.
Penny runs outside and is struck in the driveway.
Melody learns that the Whiz Kids finished ninth.
Melody confronts the team and rejects its broken trophy.
She insists on going to school despite the storm.

6Penny dies from the injuries she receives in the driveway.Ch.31

7How does Melody feel while she waits with Mrs. V?Ch.31

8What do the Whiz Kids bring back from the finals in Washington?Ch.32

9Melody deliberately carries the trophy into the hallway and throws it away.Ch.32

10What does Melody decide to do at the end of the novel?Ch.33

Part 3

Literary Elements

Understanding HOW and WHY Sharon M. Draper tells the story across Chapters 30–33.

🧠Knowledge Bank · Endings That Hand Over the Pen

Literary Craft · Climax and ResolutionA novel’s climax is not always its loudest scene; it is the moment when the pressure the book has been building finally has to break. Draper puts hers in a driveway, and she has been preparing it for thirty chapters, because the whole novel has been about how long it takes Melody to say a thing and how much can happen inside that interval. The scene works as a climax only because the reader already knows the price of delay. What follows is the resolution, and Draper makes an unusual choice there. She does not settle the plot question a reader expects — whether the team will accept Melody — because that question turns out to belong to other people. She settles the deeper one instead: who decides what Melody’s life means. The last pages hand the narrator her own subject, which is why the title arrives at the end as a plan rather than a complaint. A resolution that changes the question is the hardest kind to write, and the most satisfying.

Climax

The driveway is the novel’s highest point of pressure — the one moment when every second of delay carries a cost.

Resolution

The last chapter answers the book’s real question: not whether Melody will be accepted, but who gets to tell her story.

Title as theme

The title returns at the end as a plan — the thoughts that were stuck inside are going onto a page.

1The driveway scene works as the novel’s ___.Ch.30

2Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.30–33

Word choices:climaxresolutionprologuesimile- some words will not be used

The highest point of pressure in a plot is the .

The part that settles what the story means is the .

3Draper spends thirty chapters on how slowly Melody can speak mainly so that ___.Ch.30

4The novel ends by having the Whiz Kids finally accept Melody as a friend.Ch.33

5Melody laughing at the broken trophy and refusing it mainly shows that ___.Ch.32

6The novel’s title comes back at the end as ___.Ch.33

7A resolution can change the question a story seemed to be asking.Ch.33

8Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.30–33

Word choices:narratorsymbolsettingflashback- some words will not be used

The character who tells the story is the .

An object that stands for a larger idea is a .

9Ending on Melody’s decision to write keeps her the author of her own story.Ch.33

10Draper resolves who tells Melody’s story rather than whether the team likes her because ___.Ch.33

Part 4

Think Deeper

Four deeper challenges — no single-word recall. Read, weigh the evidence, and reason it out.

✍Knowledge Bank · Who Holds the Pen

Disability Rights · Self-RepresentationFor most of publishing history, books about disabled lives were written by people who did not live them: doctors, parents, reporters, and novelists hunting for a lesson. Advocates answered with a demand short enough to fit on a sign, and its meaning is exact: decisions and descriptions about a group should not be made without members of that group in the room. Applied to storytelling, the principle produces ownership — the difference between being written about and writing. That distinction is not merely emotional. A person describing their own life chooses which day the story starts on, which details stay private, and which parts count as ordinary, and those choices are what turn a case study into a life. Publishers now speak of authenticity in the same practical way, asking who wrote a book before asking how moving it is. Readers can apply a simpler test to anything they read about disability: count the sentences the subject actually gets to say. When the count is high, the account is usually more accurate, and the subject stays a person.

Think back over the ending. Melody’s father reporting ninth place on a morning full of thunder, then Melody choosing school over hiding at home. A manual wheelchair and an old Plexiglas board because the lightning has taken her electronic tools out of reach. A wet driveway, Penny behind the car, and kicks and cries that an overwhelmed parent reads as anger instead of warning. Then Mrs. V beside Melody, a hospital call, and the news that surgery succeeded. Finally, a quiet classroom: excuses, Rose’s tears, a cheap trophy breaking on the floor, Melody’s refusal, and a computer waiting for the first sentence of her autobiography.

Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.

1Claim: “The novel ends with Melody in charge of her own story rather than with the team finally accepting her.” — choose the two details that best prove it.Claim & Evidence

2Shrinks the delay in an emergency, or Widens the delay in an emergency? Tap each detail to send it left or right.Sort into two

◄ Shrinks the delay in an emergencyWidens the delay in an emergency ►

3Match each cause to its result. For each cause, pick its result.Cause & Effect

Lightning makes Melody use her manual chair and board→

Penny runs outside behind the car→

Mrs. V receives a call from the hospital→

Connor places the small trophy on Melody’s tray→

4Fill both blanks to complete the reasoning.Build the Argument

Melody refuses the trophy after it breaks because , which shows that .

Part 5

Standardized Test

Reading passage · The Fastest Message and the Longest Story · Emergency Communication & Narrative Agency · SAT & TOEFL-style practice

🎯 You already have the skills from the sections above — this is just a fun way to meet real SAT & TOEFL-style questions. Read the passage (the highlighted words are tested below), then answer the questions below. Tap an answer to select it, then tap it again to confirm — you can change your choice until you confirm.

In an emergency, communication is measured in seconds. People who speak can push out a two-word warning almost without deciding to, but anyone who communicates by selecting symbols, letters, or stored phrases faces a delay that engineers call latency — the gap between choosing a message and delivering it. A device fast enough for a conversation about homework can be far too slow for a driveway. Designers answer by putting the most urgent messages under a single large button, so that one deliberate press produces a whole sentence at volume.

Speed alone is not enough, because any single channel can fail. Emergency planners therefore build in redundancy: a second way to send the same message when the first one is unavailable. For a person who uses a speech-generating device, that might mean a paper board kept in the car, an alert button worn on the wrist, and a family member trained to read facial signals and eye movement. Good plans also brief the people on the other end, since responders who have never met an augmentative communicator may read a slow reply as confusion.

The same technology raises a larger question once the emergency is over. Communication tools are usually sold as a way to make requests, yet the people who use them describe something bigger: agency, the power to act and decide rather than be decided about. A person who can compose whole paragraphs can argue, joke, refuse, and eventually write. That last step matters most, because for generations accounts of disabled lives were produced by observers rather than by the people living them. When the subject becomes the author, the account gains the one thing no observer can supply.

Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.

1What is the passage mainly about?SAT · Central Ideas

2According to the passage, latency is a problem because ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

3In the passage, latency means ___.SAT · Words in Context

4According to the passage, the most urgent messages are placed ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

5Insert Text (TOEFL). Look at the four squares [1]–[4] in the excerpt below. They show where this sentence could be added:
“The second channel does not have to be electronic to work.”

Emergency planners assume that any single channel will eventually fail. [1] A device can be left charging in another room, or run out of power at the worst possible moment. [2] A paper board in the car, an alert button on the wrist, or a partner trained to read a look can all carry the same message. [3] What matters is that a second route already exists before anyone needs it. [4]

Where would the sentence fit best?TOEFL · Insert Text

6In the passage, redundancy means ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary

7According to the passage, responders who have never met an augmentative communicator may ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

8In the passage, agency means ___.SAT · Words in Context

9The passage suggests that a device sold only for making requests ___.SAT · Inference

10The passage ends by claiming that an author supplies something ___.SAT · Central Ideas

Part 6 · Optional

Creative Writing

A bonus challenge to practice your English. Take your time and have fun with it.

About This Section

This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!

Writing Task — Part 8 “Your Own First Sentence”

Melody ends the novel by deciding to write her own story instead of accepting the version other people keep handing her. Plan the same thing for yourself. Choose the day, the moment, or the year your story would start on, explain why you would start there instead of at your birth, and name one thing you would leave out on purpose and one thing most people would never guess belongs in it. 6–10 sentences. End with the actual first sentence of your book.

You can start with: “If I wrote my own story, I would not start at the beginning, because...”

0 / 40 words minimum

🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)

No right or wrong — tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.

Part 8 Complete — You Finished the Book! 🎉

You finished Chapters 30–33 — the final part of Out of My Mind.

Here are your auto-graded results — scroll down for your full Report Card across all parts:

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Your Writing

Your writing was checked automatically for length, spelling, grammar, and whether you included the key parts of the scene. Scroll back to Part 5 anytime to read your feedback and improve your work.

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Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Sharon M. Draper. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Sharon M. Draper’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.