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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage was chosen because it contains the book’s most understated piece of comic mercy. Ms. Morengo — a patent attorney carrying legal power — breaks the tension of Zero’s confession with a joke about foot odor. The detail that Stanley’s father has been trying to invent a sneaker-recycler (and settled instead for a deodorant) is the quiet comic frame for the whole Yelnats saga: a family of inventors who almost, but never quite, solve the right problem. Copying this passage trains students to notice how comic register is used to release narrative pressure at moral turning points.
“No, he’s still working on that,” explained Ms. Morengo. “But he invented a product that eliminates foot odor. Here, I’ve got a sample in my briefcase. I wish I had more. You two could bathe in it.”
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 49 in eight to ten sentences. Move from the hundred-year-old flashback (Sam, Mary Lou, Walter, Bo, Jesse, onion juice, ‘The lizards don’t like onion blood’) to the present-day BMW ride (Ms. Morengo, Stanley, Hector, the locked suitcase, Derrick Dunne’s alibi, Zero’s confession and Ms. Morengo’s legal refusal to hear it, Stanley’s father’s peach-scented invention, and the final raindrop falling into the empty lake). Your retelling should make clear what the onion-juice flashback secretly explains about the previous chapter.
Discussion Questions
- Sam’s century-old warning — ‘The lizards don’t like onion blood’ — is placed in Chapter 49, after the reader has already witnessed Stanley and Hector survive a night in the lizard nest. Why does Sachar reveal the mechanism of their survival retroactively rather than in Chapter 41 when the danger is active? What does this structural choice argue about the relationship between cause and discovery in a well-built novel?
- Ms. Morengo’s response to Zero’s confession — ‘I didn’t hear that. And I advise you to make sure I don’t hear it again’ — is legal advice disguised as a refusal. Distinguish between a lawyer who ignores a client’s confession and a lawyer who actively coaches a child through one. What does Ms. Morengo’s phrasing teach Hector about how to survive the next adult who might hear him?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Created or designed something new that did not exist before
Item 2
Completely removes or gets rid of something
Item 3
A small portion of something used to demonstrate or test what the whole is like
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Critical Thinking
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