Pre
reading activities.
·
Look at the
illustration on page 9. On page 11 you read " I am a sister, a daughter, a wife
and a friend. my name is Ursula, which means little bear. It is a family name."
Who could be the people in Ursula’s family? Make predictions about the story of
her family.
·
Here are
some significant sentences from the chapter in scrambled order. Suggest the
order in which they will occur.
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Now I enjoy the
Waltz too. I taught my husband the basic steps so that we could have a
traditional dance at our wedding before the rock and roll started. |
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I was eight years
old when my father took me out for ice cream, just the two of us, and
told me my parents were getting a divorce. |
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When I was eleven
years old my father sent me to ballroom dance lessons. I hated them. |
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Americans tend to
move around quite a bit … and so we too moved back to a house on dry
land. |
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I was born in San
Francisco on the morning of June 24th, 1977. |
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When
I was about three years old, we went to live on a sailboat on the Bay,
near Sausalito. |
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Both my parents
grew up in the state of New York at the height of the hippy days they
grew their hair long and migrated west to California. |
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America has always
been too big a concept for me and while I was living in the States, I
never necessarily thought of myself as American. I only began to feel
more American after living in Italy for a while. |
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I have two sisters,
Nicole who is older than me and Lara who is younger. |
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I
remember always drawing during recess in kindergarden. (…) In elementary
school … the part I loved the most wasn’t necessarily writing in our
main lesson books, but illustrating them. |
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We used to go
visit Grandma Rose (…) Grandma Rose’s mother had immigrated to the
States from Sicily when she was still young. |
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Looking back I see
that it was good for me to grow up in two households, it gave me a sense
of two completely different worlds. They both lived in opposite ways and
I see that now, as an adult in my own home, I’ve taken on a bit of each,
mixing and matching the things I liked. |