These prompts can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before or after reading the novel.

Personal Response Prompt

One of Melody’s biggest hurdles is arriving to a point of Self-Acceptance that only she can achieve. What are some ways you’ve come to accept yourself and how can you continue to do so?

Teaching Suggestion: Discuss with students ways they’ve learned to accept themselves by modeling examples from your own experience. Encourage students to journal about their growth and to provide a list of ways they plan to continue their own self-acceptance practices in the future.

Post-Reading Analysis

Rewrite Melody’s trivia team trip with an ending different from what happens in Out of My Mind. How does Perseverance in the Face of Prejudice help Melody? What are things you would change and what are things you would keep the same? Why?

Teaching Suggestion: Discuss with students how they felt reading about Melody being left behind from the trivia team’s trip. Ask students how they would have felt being left behind for such a trip and ask why they think Draper wrote the trip the way she did.

• An interview with Sharon Draper about why she wrote Out of My Mind, and why she decided to write Melody’s story.