Your outline is simply these five parts of your essay:

Your thesis statement which must directly answer the prompt on the assignment page: What are some specific gains and losses of being an immigrant in America as experienced by Dumas’ family (and perhaps the writer’s family as well)? It must come at the end of your introductory paragraph and could be more than one sentence long if you want.
Topic sentences - These are the sentences at the beginning of each supporting section of your essay. Topic sentences are also opinions. They state the opinions you are going to prove in each supporting section.
**Keep in mind that your topic sentences should be claims to prove rather than facts. Each of the topic sentences should make a claim about a gain or loss. Then, in the rest of that supporting section, you prove the truth of that claim with details and examples from the book.

Here’s sentence that would NOT work as a topic sentence because it is a fact rather than a claim:

Dumas discovers it’s harder for her family to celebrate Nowruz in America.

To revise that sentence to make it a true topic sentence that makes a claim that supports your thesis, you might try this:

One loss for Dumas’ family in coming to America is the inability to celebrate their cultural traditions as fully as before.

Or, if you want to write a topic sentence that includes your family’s experience, you might try this:

One loss for many immigrant families in coming to America is losing the ability to celebrate their cultural traditions as fully as before.
In the Final Exam Essay, each topic sentence should name a specific gain or loss experienced by Dumas' family and/or other immigrant families, and it should make a claim (state an opinion) which supports your thesis. For the Final Exam Essay, you are probably going to have three topic sentences for three supporting sections, but you could have more or less.

A restatement of your thesis - at the beginning of your conclusion you should restate your thesis in slightly different words.You can use this outline worksheet to write your outline or you can just write your outline on a separate sheet of paper. Whether you use the outline worksheet or not, it's fine to handwrite your outline, take a picture of it, and upload the picture.

Some people like to write their rough draft before they write their outline. Some people like to write their outline and then their rough draft. You can decide what works best for you. In any case, when you have written your rough draft, your outline is basically just around 5 sentences from your rough draft: the thesis, topic sentences, and restatement of conclusion.

The only reason I have you turn in your outline separately is so that you can see clearly if the thesis statement and topic sentences are doing what they should do. Sometimes that is easier to see when they are separated from the rest of the essay.