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Copywork
About This Passage
Three sentences, and a whole narrative method inside them. The narrator opens by guessing your question — a move that breaks the usual wall between book and reader — then answers it with two flat declaratives. Copy the punctuation closely: the colon that hands the question over, the question mark inside a sentence about you, the period that drops 'Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys' like a verdict. Notice what the directness buys: a narrator who answers the question you were holding feels trustworthy, and Sachar will spend that trust carefully through everything this chapter does next.
The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake? Most campers weren’t given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think Sachar most wanted the reader to notice: the camp's theory about bad boys, the judge's strange offer, or the quiet facts behind Stanley's yes. Name the moment you would call the chapter's center, and say what makes it hold that place.
Discussion Questions
- This chapter opens with the narrator guessing our question — 'The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake?' — and answering it at once. Why might Sachar give his narrator this mind-reading move at the start of the chapter? Use the opening passage to explain what a narrator gains by naming the reader's question before answering it.
- The camp's theory at Camp Green Lake arrives in one confident sentence — dig a hole every day in the hot sun and a bad boy turns good — and is set at a distance in the next: 'That was what some people thought.' Who might those 'some people' be, and why does the chapter leave them unnamed? Use the words of both sentences to explain how the distance changes the theory's authority.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
The power to pick between options; here, an offer whose options are both punishments.
Item 2
The official whose courtroom words decide a person's path.
Item 3
The locked alternative that makes any other option sound kind.
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Critical Thinking
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