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Copywork
About This Passage
This family story is the emotional heart of Chapter 21. Stanley reaches for it while walking back across the same kind of desert, and the phrase 'found refuge on God's thumb' will become one of the novel's most important mysteries. Copying these sentences carefully lets the student feel how a family memory travels across generations and lands in a boy's mind when he needs it most.
Somehow his great-grandfather had survived for seventeen days, before he was rescued by a couple of rattlesnake hunters. He was insane when they found him. When he was asked how he had lived so long, ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 21 from Stanley's walk across the wasteland through his near-step on the rattlesnake to his surprise at the nearly finished hole.
Discussion Questions
- How does Stanley see his own situation differently after he remembers his great-grandfather's seventeen days in the desert, and what does the comparison reveal about the kind of person Stanley is becoming?
- The rattlesnake's rattle and the Warden's painted nails both carry venom, yet the chapter places them on opposite sides of a moral line. What makes one dangerous animal honest and another beautiful person deceitful?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Stayed alive through something very dangerous or extremely hard.
Item 2
Saved from harm or from a place a person could not leave alone.
Item 3
Having lost the normal use of the mind, often because of terrible suffering.
+ 5 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
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