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Halloween

It's Just a Spider

It's Just a Spider
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 7 to 9
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   3.43

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    Nooooooooooooooo, budge, swelling, better, burning, goal, mostly, whatever, instead, fear, half, several, being, sometime, move, anywhere
     content words:    Lake City

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It's Just a Spider
By Kathleen W. Redman 		  
1     Kayla hated spiders. No, that was not true. She didn't really hate them. She was afraid of them, so very afraid of them! Even a picture of a spider in a book would make her scream.
 
2     When Kayla was five years old she had gone to visit her cousins in Lake City. They had been exploring an old abandoned house when the spider bit her. She had walked into its web in the dark room. The spider had fallen from its web onto her arm and bit her. Her aunt had taken her to the hospital when her arm started burning and swelling up. The shot had helped, but her arm hurt for days.
 
3     Now she was afraid of spiders and never went anywhere near them. If she saw a spider web, she walked out of her way to keep from being close to it.
 
4     Right now, though, Kayla was thinking about the spider web that a tiny spider had spun across the corner of her front door sometime in the night a week ago. When she had opened the door, she had screamed and run back into the house. She had used a broom to knock down the web, and then had run out the door without looking back.
 
5     The next morning there had been two webs and two spiders in the corners of the door. This time Kayla's mother had helped her knock down the webs. Kayla's mother had laughed and said the spiders were getting back at her for knocking down the first web. Kayla really didn't think her mother was very funny.
 
6     There hadn't been any spiders or webs for the next few days, and Kayla had almost forgotten about them. She was excited about being on the soccer team, so the spiders didn't seem so important. This morning, though, she had to think about them. She was terrified. When she had opened the door to go to school, there had been five spiders as big as half dollars sitting in webs that almost covered the doorway!
 
7     Were they out to get her? What if they just kept coming back and coming back? What if they got bigger and bigger?
 
8     "No!" Kayla said out loud. "No! I can't keep thinking that way. It's silly. They're just insects. They don't think the way we do. I'm just imagining things!"

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