Out of the Dust

Name: ___________________________________________________ Date: ______________________

Section 10: The Piano Player through Following in His Steps

1. What does Billie Jo especially not want people to say when she plays the piano?

2. What is “no good” in the poem of that name?

3. What did Billie Jo have to check about the snow that fell in Snow?

4. What does Billie Jo think is her father’s reason for wanting to attend night school?

5. Why does Calb Hardly miss Pete Guymon in Dust Pneumonia?

6. After all of the trauma of the dust storm, what does Billie Jo do at the end of the poem of that name?

7. What is the “broken promise” in the poem of that name?

8. Who could make Billie Jo less eager to leave home?

9. What happened to Haydon Parley Nye’s widow?

Section 10 Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues

Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the words in bold mean.

1. I don’t say/it hurts like the parched earth with each note.

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2. My father thought maybe/he ought to go to night school,/so if the farm failed/there’d be prospects to 

    fall back on.

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3. Calb Hardly teased Pete Guymon about his wheezy/truck sucking in dust.

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4. …the reassuring noises,/that no matter how brittle and sharp life seemed,/no matter how brittle and

    sharp she seemed, she was still my ma who loved me….

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Part II: Determining the Meaning: Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.

___48. parched                        A. fragile; likely to break

___49. prospects                     B. making a hoarse whistling sound

___50. wheezy                         C. chances; possibilities

___51. brittle                            D. extremely dry; exposed to heat