edHelper.com
Summer
 Our Summer Visitor

Our Summer Visitor
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 3 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   4.73

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    evenings, feathery, teaching, devour, atop, chuckle, actually, easily, chasing, dominoes, untouched, fellow, matched, nearly, marked, upstairs
     content words:    Memorial Day, Cyrus Grey, Coast Creek, Pinewood Lake, When Daddy, Star Light, Star Bright, Labor Day

Print Our Summer Visitor
     Print Our Summer Visitor  (font options, pick words for additional puzzles, and more)

Quickly Print - PDF format
     Quickly Print: PDF (2 columns per page)
     Quickly Print: PDF (full page)

Quickly Print - HTML format
     Quickly Print: HTML

Proofreading Activity
     Print a proofreading activity

Feedback on Our Summer Visitor
     Leave your feedback on Our Summer Visitor  (use this link if you found an error in the story)

Our Summer Visitor
By Joyce Furstenau 		  
1     We lost Granddad in the fall of my sixth grade year. He had been sick only a short time. Our old house seemed empty without him there. We were glad there was school to keep us busy. None of us were looking forward to summer without Granddad.
 
2     Mom left his upstairs room untouched. She said she wasn't ready to clean it out yet. The following spring, Dad lost his job at the factory. Our parents decided to rent out Granddad's room for the summer. Mom said they needed to do it to help make ends meet. She said that taking in a boarder would help pay the bills until Dad found work again.
 
3     My two younger brothers and I didn't take to the idea at all. Everyone missed Granddad. We didn't want anyone taking his place, or his room, no matter how much we needed the money. Nevertheless, our parents informed us they had found a suitable boarder that May. Mom said he was an older gentleman wanting to summer on the coast because of his lungs. He arrived on Friday afternoon that Memorial Day weekend.
 
4     Mom introduced us to Cyrus Grey at supper that evening. He appeared to be about sixty, but I never was a good judge of age. Something about him seemed familiar. He was tall and thin and had thickset broad shoulders. His salt and pepper hair matched his name. He seemed a good-natured fellow, and he chuckled a lot. Sometimes he winked when he spoke to one of us boys. We did not warm to him right away simply out of principle.
 
5     The town of Coast Creek had a Memorial Day parade that weekend. Mom and Dad invited Cyrus to join us if he had not made other plans. To our great surprise, he accepted. He easily joined the conversation on the trip into town. He laughed heartily when the three of us begged our parents for cotton candy from the street vendor at the parade. With our father's approval, he bought us each a blue fluffy cotton candy floating atop a paper cone. We thanked Mr. Grey properly and then proceeded to devour our sweet confections. I think it was at that moment that Cyrus became our friend.

Paragraphs 6 to 13:
For the complete story with questions: click here for printable
Copyright © 2009 edHelper