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Copywork
About This Passage
Selected for the rhetorical paradox of the closing sentence: "It was a good warm feeling." The four sentences before it have established cold, fear, and trembling — and then the fifth sentence labels the whole experience "good" and "warm" without explanation. Lobel refuses to gloss the contradiction. The reader is left to recognize that what the sentence describes is real and that the reader has felt it too. The mechanical lesson is in how short declaratives can carry far more weight than elaborate description: each sentence is one image, set down without transition, and the cumulative effect is closer to liturgy than to prose.
Frog and Toad sat close by the fire. They were scared. The teacups shook in their hands. They were having the shivers. It was a good warm feeling.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?
Discussion Questions
- Lobel constructs the chapter as a story within a story: the outer frame is Frog and Toad by the fire, and the inner narrative is Frog's account of being lost in the woods as a child. Why does Lobel insist on the frame? Could the inner story have stood alone, and what does the frame contribute that an unframed ghost story would not?
- Three times Toad asks whether the story is true. Three times Frog answers, "Maybe yes and maybe no." Frog could have settled the question and chooses not to. Argue whether this refusal is an act of artistic discipline, an act of friendship, or a single act that is both at once.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Involuntary tremblings of the body; in this chapter the word is a noun naming the whole pleasurable experience of safe fear, not just the physical reaction.
Item 2
Producing a long, loud, sad sound; the wind's howling at the chapter's opening establishes the auditory mood from which the ghost story can grow.
Item 3
Very bad, causing real fear; the older fairy-tale sense of the word, used by Frog's father to mark the Old Dark Frog as a creature whose harm is real within the inner story.
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Critical Thinking
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