6th Grade Summer Reading
A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck
About this book:
Set during the years 1929–1942, and told in eight engaging episodes, this fresh and funny novel recounts a boy and his sister's annual summer trips to rural Illinois to visit their eccentric grandmother. Grandma Dowdel, a remarkable largerthanlife character, continually astounds her grandchildren with her nonconformist behavior and her gutsy, takecharge attitude.
What happens when Joey and his sister, Mary Alice — two city slickers from Chicago — make their annual summer visits to Grandma Dowdel's seemingly sleepy Illinois town? ★ August 1929: They see their first corpse, and he isn't resting easy. ★ August 1930: The Cowgilll boys terrorize the town, and Grandma fights back with a dead mouse and a bottle of milk. ★ August 1931: Joey and Mary Alice help Grandma to trespass, pinch property, poach, catch the sheriff in his underwear, and feed the hungry — all in one day. ★ And there's more — much more — as Joey and Mary Alice make seven summer trips to Grandma's, each one funnier and more surprising than the year before.
Choose one of the following activities and bring it in on the first day of school:
1. Create a travel brochure for grandma’s town. Use descriptions from the book to create the brochure, be creative, use color, and include a sentence about each place pictured. You must feature 5 places in the town.
2. On poster board, or large paper, create a character map of Grandma Dowdel. You must include at least 5 descriptions with explanations on the board.
3. As Joey points out in this book, Chicago during the 1920's was quite famous for its notorious gangsters. In addition to Al Capone and Bugs Moran, men such as Sam Giancana, Albert Anselmi, Tony Accardo ruled the underworld of America's second largest city. Your task is to investigate a mobster from the 1920's and write a brief report on him/her. Include a photograph of the person you investigate. This report should contain at least four interesting facts. As a twist to this assignment, you can do a law enforcement official of this era instead (i.e. Eliot Ness).