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Copywork
About This Passage
Six sentences built as a ring: pretending opens it, pretending closes it, and a childhood sits in the middle. Attend to the inventory — soccer with a marble, bungee jumping on broken rubber bands — where every detail is poverty transmuted into play, and to the class note struck in the first sentence: 'just like rich kids do,' four words that price the whole fantasy. The inversion at the ring's two ends is the craft worth absorbing: the boy who once pretended toys were at camp now needs the toy camp to survive the real one. Copy the paragraph attending to how its shape — frame, catalog, return — carries an argument no sentence states.
Stanley and his parents had tried to pretend that he was just going away to camp for a while, just like rich kids do. When Stanley was younger he used to play with stuffed animals, and pretend the ani...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment in it. Explain what it reveals about the book's method — how this narrator handles pain, hope, and information — and what the chapter would become without it.
Discussion Questions
- The chapter proposes that the family's hopefulness might be 'part of the curse as well,' since hope is what makes crushed hopes hurt. What must be true about suffering for hope to deepen it rather than ease it — and does the chapter's own evidence about Stanley's father support that dark suggestion or quietly push against it, and why? Use the chapter's words about the family's hopes and failures to defend your reading.
- The chapter narrates real injuries — poverty, public humiliation, a wrongful conviction — in comedy's clothing: a curse with a ridiculous name, an apartment smelling of 'burning rubber and foot odor,' a robbery that is 'kind of cool.' What does the comic register permit this chapter to say that a solemn telling could not, and what does the comedy cost? Use the chapter's phrases to weigh both sides, then explain why Sachar chose laughter for this material.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
According to the story people tell — said with one eyebrow raised.
Item 2
The hot shame of being exposed in front of others.
Item 3
Forced into a space too small — packed without room to breathe.
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Critical Thinking
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