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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the hinge of the novel — the moment Brian Robeson's ordinary unhappiness as a divorce-shuttled thirteen-year-old becomes a survival emergency. Paulsen's three short paragraphs and the single-word final line perform on the page what silence in the cockpit performs in the story. Studying it teaches how sentence length, paragraph breaks, and repetition carry feeling.
He was sitting in a bushplane roaring seven thousand feet above the northern wilderness with a pilot who had suffered a massive heart attack and who was either dead or in something close to a coma. He...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In three to five sentences, retell what happens in Chapter 1 — who Brian is, why he is on the plane, what goes wrong with the pilot, and where the chapter leaves him at the end.
Discussion Questions
- Paulsen returns again and again to the words 'Divorce,' 'The Secret,' 'Split,' and 'Fights,' setting them on their own lines. What is the author doing by breaking these words out of the paragraphs, and how does the form of the page show the way Brian's mind is working?
- When Brian's mother hands him the hatchet and says 'Just like a scout. My little scout,' Brian feels the burning in his eyes and turns away. What does this small exchange reveal about the difference between what Brian knows and what his mother is allowed to see?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A small, rugged airplane used to fly into remote wilderness areas where there are no real runways.
Item 2
Making a loud, deep, continuous sound like a powerful engine or a strong wind.
Item 3
A wild region of forest, water, or mountains where few or no people live.
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Critical Thinking
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