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Copywork
About This Passage
Five sentences that work like a syllogism with a boy at the end of it: premise (a camp for bad boys), theory (digging manufactures goodness), dissent (one flat past-tense sentence), and application (a named boy, offered the machine). Copy the unit attending to its argumentative joints — how 'If you take... it will turn' borrows the grammar of a recipe, how 'That was what some people thought' undoes the recipe without raising its voice, and how 'Stanley Yelnats was given a choice' lands a particular human being on the conveyor belt the paragraph just built. The art worth imitating is the sequencing: each sentence inherits the last one's claim and quietly audits it.
Most campers weren’t given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys. If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy. That was what...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell the chapter as the argument it is — premise, theory, dissent, application — and then name the single most important sentence in it. Explain what that sentence reveals about the book's method, and what the chapter would become without it.
Discussion Questions
- The camp's theory promises transformation: dig a hole every day in the hot sun, and a bad boy will turn into a good boy. What must its believers assume about goodness for that promise to make sense at Camp Green Lake? Use the theory's exact words to test the assumption, and decide whether the chapter leaves any version of it standing.
- These eight sentences could have been folded into the chapters around them, yet Sachar gives them a chapter of their own. Why might this material deserve its own room — what does the isolation accomplish that a paragraph inside another chapter could not? Use the chapter's structure and its opening and closing details about Camp Green Lake and Stanley to defend your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A word that promises summer and play — and is doing very different work in this book.
Item 2
An option offered; here, an offer whose alternatives were both written by power.
Item 3
A verb of permission; in the judge's mouth, permission with no real freedom behind it.
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Critical Thinking
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