"The Jacket"

Gary Soto's personal narrative "The Jacket" uses many similes to describe how a piece of clothing affected a boy.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 6 Unit 1's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Imperfect Me, My Superpowers, Flipped, The Jacket, Kira-Kira, Thank You, M'am, Pandora and the Whispering Box, Eleven, The Treasure of Lemon Brown, The Fun They Had
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. bitter
    marked by strong resentment or cynicism
    I remember the green coat that I wore in fifth and sixth grades when you either danced like a champ or pressed yourself against a greasy wall, bitter as a penny toward the happy couples.
  2. guacamole
    a dip made of mashed avocado
    The next day when I got home from school, I discovered draped on my bedpost a jacket the color of day-old guacamole.
  3. approach
    move towards
    I threw my books on the bed and approached the jacket slowly, as if it were a stranger whose hand I had to shake.
  4. profile
    an outline of something, especially a face from the side
    I stood in front of the mirror, full face, then profile, and then looked over my shoulder as if someone had called me.
  5. braille
    raised writing that can be read by the visually impaired
    Even though it was cold, I took off the jacket during lunch and played kickball in a thin shirt, my arms feeling like braille from goose bumps.
  6. crooked
    having or marked by bends or angles; not straight or aligned
    I sat on my hands, heating them up, while my teeth chattered like a cup of crooked dice.
  7. propeller
    device with blades that rotate to push against air or water
    At lunchtime I stayed with the ugly boys who leaned against the chainlink fence and looked around with propellers of grass spinning in our mouths.
  8. bookend
    a support placed at the end of a row of books to keep them upright (on a shelf or table)
    We saw girls walk by alone, saw couples, hand in hand, their heads like bookends pressing air together.
  9. blame
    attribute responsibility to
    I blame that jacket for those bad years.
  10. scab
    the crustlike surface of a healing skin lesion
    I finally Scotch-taped it closed, but in rain or cold weather the tape peeled off like a scab
  11. shrivel
    decrease in size, range, or extent
    and more stuffing fell out until that sleeve shriveled into a palsied arm.
  12. vicious
    able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering
    But whole pieces still casually flew off my jacket when I played hard, read quietly, or took vicious spelling tests at school.
  13. camouflage
    fabric making a wearer hard to distinguish from a background
    When it became so spotted that my brother began to call me "camouflage," I flung it over the fence into the alley.
  14. mope
    be apathetic, gloomy, or dazed
    Later, however, I swiped the jacket off the ground and went inside to drape it across my lap and mope.
  15. alley
    a narrow street with walls on both sides
    I started up the alley and soon slipped into my jacket, that green ugly brother who breathed over my shoulder that day and ever since.
Created on Tue Aug 12 15:43:29 EDT 2014 (updated Wed Aug 13 09:39:21 EDT 2014)

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