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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the hinge of Chapter 29. A lightning flash reveals a mountain peak shaped like a giant fist with its thumb pointed at the sky — and then darkness takes it away. Notice Sachar's phrase 'a huge web of lightning,' which lets us picture the storm, and the careful uncertainty of the last line: 'Stanley wasn't sure whether he'd seen it or not.' That uncertainty is where the chapter's power lies. The mountain is both real and possibly imagined, and the novel will not tell us which yet.
The horizon lit up with a huge web of lightning. In that split second Stanley thought he saw an unusual rock formation on top of one of the mountain peaks. The peak looked to him exactly like a giant ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Narrate Chapter 29 in order, paying attention to three moments Sachar carefully sets up: (1) the boys' hopeful joking about the storm, (2) the lightning flash that reveals the fist-and-thumb mountain, (3) Stanley's memory of his great-grandfather's words 'I found refuge on God's thumb.' Connect these three moments — what is Sachar building for the reader by putting them in this order?
Discussion Questions
- X-Ray jokes, 'Forty days and forty nights. Guess we better start building us an ark. Get two of each animal, right?' and Zigzag answers, 'Two rattlesnakes. Two scorpions. Two yellow-spotted lizards.' What does Zigzag's joke tell you about what kind of 'animals' count at Camp Green Lake? How is this different from the animals you would choose for an ark at home?
- Sachar says 'Sound travels a great distance across a barren wasteland.' How does the emptiness of the lakebed change what the boys can hear and see? Why would hearing thunder from a storm thirty seconds of sound-travel away feel different than hearing thunder from a storm right next door?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
The line far in the distance where the sky seems to meet the land or sea.
Item 2
A bright flash of electricity in the sky during a storm.
Item 3
A natural shape or arrangement, like the shape a group of rocks makes together.
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Critical Thinking
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