Out of the Dust
Name: ___________________________________________________ Date: ______________________
Section 12: The Visit through Old Bones
1. What kind of job was Mad Dog hoping to get in
2. Who wound up in a kind of freak show?
3. What does Billie Jo’s father put on the shelf above the piano beside her mother’s book of poetry and
her aunt’s invitation?
4. What did Miss Freeland do when Billie Jo played the piano at graduation?
5. What started filling up when the rain poured down?
6. What did Billie Jo’s father do after it rained and he got the tractor started?
7. Who is singing in his saddle since the rain came?
8. Why can’t Billie Jo work for the CCC?
9. What was everybody in town doing at the Joyce City Hardware and Furniture Company on a Sunday
afternoon?
10. What did Harley Madden find at the church one Sunday? .
11. Where did Billie Jo find the dimes her mother had saved from the money she earned playing piano?
12. What does Billie Jo’s father say when she proposes that they go to see the dinosaur site?
Section 12 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. He just keep that invitation from her/glowering down at me from the shelf above the piano.
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2. And then it changed,/halfway between snow and rain,/sleet,/glazing the earth.
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3. Mrs. Love is taking applications/for boys to do CCC work.
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4. …the Lindberghs said good night to one and lost it….
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5. …a song for my little brother,/buried in Ma’s arms on a knoll overlooking the/banks of the Beaver….
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6. Bones/showing/in the green shale….
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7. I think for a moment of Joe De La Flor/herding brontosaurus instead of cattle/and I/smile.
Part II: Determining the Meaning: Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
___58. glowering A. rock made of layers of sediment
___59. glazing B. Charles and Ann Lindbergh, whose baby was stolen
___60. CCC C. a small rounded hill
___61. Lindberghs D. large dinosaur of the Jurassic period
___62. knoll E. Civilian Conservation Corps
___63. shale F. looking or staring angrily or sullenly
___64. brontosaurus G. putting a thin glassy coating on