Out of My Mind is told from the Point of View of an 11-year-old girl, named Melody Brooks. Melody was born with cerebral palsy and relies on their next-door neighbor Valencia, or Mrs. V, and her parents. Melody is very intelligent, she has a photographic memory so she can take in everything she hears or sees very easily. One day, Melody finds out she can hear colors and smell images. However, Melody wishes she was able to live and communicate like every other kid.
Her mother took her to Dr. Hugely when Melody was five. The doctor's visit was to determine how intelligent she is, and if she could be enrolled in school. Dr. Hugely gives Melody short tests. After some tests, he concludes that Melody has brain damage, and suggests that her parents send her to a residential facility or a developmentally disabled, so they don't have to raise her. Thankfully, Melody's mother knows that she is truly intelligent., and tells the doctor that he is wrong, and she is going to enroll Melody in Spaulding Street Elementary School.
Melody starts elementary school in a learning program for kids with special needs and spends the next five years there. At the start, she is in classroom H-5 but finds the program to easy. When Melody was little, her mother made a communication board with numbers, words, and phrases on it. Over time the tray became too easy for Melody, and with the help of Mrs. V, their next-door neighbor, she re-makes Melody's communication board, and Melody can learn new words every day. When Melody turns eight, her parents surprise her with a puppy, who gets the name butterscotch. Then, a little while later, the Brooks family had Penny, a baby girl.
When Melody starts 5th grade, her parents give her an electric wheelchair. Her school also starts a program to allow the H-5 students to interact with other classes. During these classes, Melody meets a kid girl, Rose. Melody also meets two girls, Claire and Molly, who have a history of being mean to most kids. Melody's teacher, Mrs. Shannon, hires Catherine as an aide to help Melody in her classes. Catherine and Melody discover a device called the Medi-talker, to help Melody communicate.
In Melody's Launges Arts class, her teacher, Mrs. Gorden, tells the students about an autobiography project they will be doing at the end of the year. Mr. Dimming, Melody's History teacher, has the class participate in practice exercises for their school's Whiz Kids quiz team. Every year the school sends a team to the Whiz Kids competition. During the exercise, Melody gets a perfect score. Her teachers and classmates, mostly Molly and Claire are shocked and skeptical. The skepticism bothers Melodu but with the help of Cathrine in school, and Mrs. V after school, she studies hard to properly prepare for the team tryouts. Melody takes the real test, getting another perfect score, and secures a place on the school team. Mr. Dimming apologizes to Melody for underestimating her. The quiz team spends the next two weeks studying and practicing after school. Even though Melody is part of the team, she does not feel a sense of belonging.
After Melody and her team compete in the Southwest Ohio regional competition and win. Melody makes her team members jealous by receiving an unwanted amount of media attention.
Mrs. V and the Brooks family take Melody and her mom to the airport so they can get on a plane to Washington, D.C. for the Whiz Kids national finals. When they get to the airport, an airline employee informed them that their plane had been canceled due to bad weather, but the rest of the team arrived early enough and they were able to board a different flight before the cancellations began. Melody is upset and angry that her team left her behind.
The next morning, Melody's father comes into her room with the news that the team came in ninth place in the D.C. finals and won a tiny trophy. Melody decides she wants to go to school to show that she can rise above the whole situation and to see Cathrine. It's a very stormy day and due to the lightning, Melody is forced t
to use her manual wheelchair and her old plexiglas communication board. With difficulty, her mother gets her into the car for school. Suddenly, Melody sees Penny running out of the house. Melody realizes her mother didn't notice and starts frantically screaming and flailing about. Her mother is frustrated with Melody and the morning's events and starts backing the car down the driveway, and they feel a soft thump. Horrified, they realized it was Penny, Penny had a very broken leg and would undergo a surgical procedure, but she will be fine.
Melody goes to school to face her quiz team teammates.n Mr. Dimming and the rest of her team make up reasons why they left her behind. The teams decides to give Melody their little plastic trophy to make up for it. Melody starts giggling when all of the sudden her hand jerks, knocking the trophy to the ground and causing it to break. She uses her Medi-Talker to say that she doesn't want it and that they deserve it. Still laughing, she leaves the room.
At the end of the school year, Melody find out that she is not so different from everyone else after all, and that she carries some of the same worries as other fifth-grade students. She starts working on her autobiography project for Miss Gorden's class, She begins her autobiography titled Out of My Mind with "I'm surrounded by thousands of words," the same words that start the book.
summarize each paraphph
1. Melody Brooks is an 11-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who struggles to communicate like other kids. She starts school in a program for kids with special needs but finds it too easy. Her mother helps her communicate better and she eventually gets an electric wheelchair and an aide named Catherine to assist her at school.
2. Melody joins the school's Whiz Kids quiz team and surprises everyone by getting a perfect score on the practice exercises. She earns a spot on the team and they win the regional competition. However, she feels isolated from her team members and eventually gets left behind for the national finals in Washington, D.C.
3. Due to a canceled flight, Melody misses the national finals and her team wins a small trophy without her. She decides to show resilience by going to school on her own during a storm, but tragedy strikes when her dog Penny is injured in an accident.
4. Melody faces her quiz team teammates at school and they apologize for leaving her behind. She decides to give their trophy back and realizes that she is not so different from other fifth-grade students after all. She begins working on her autobiography project titled Out of My Mind.