The sixth grade students started one of my favorite novels this week, Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. Here is the "Before the Story" you can find on page one of the novel. While reading the novel, the students will continue to practice various comprehension strategies as well as vocabulary practice and application.
Before the Story
They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.
They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept.
They say if you knew he was coming and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it, within two or three blocks he would be as slow as everybody else.
What's true, what's myth? It's hard to know.
Finsterwald's gone now, yet even today you'll never find a kids sitting on the steps where he once lived. The Little League field is still there, and the band shell. Cobble's Corner still stands at the corner of Hector and Birch, and if you ask the man behind the counter, he'll take the clump of string out of a drawer and let you see it.
But that's okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these parts, well, just run your hand under you movie seat and be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.
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