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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage comes the morning after the storm and just before Papa's long speech about work and help. Rawls chooses physical, body-located language — 'puffed out my chest,' 'sucked my lungs full,' 'tingling sensations clear down to my toes' — so that the reader feels the reset in the narrator's body before his father explains, in the next scene, what reset his mind will need. Good writing rarely explains feelings; it describes what the body is doing while it feels them.
It was one of those perfect Ozark mornings—clean, fresh, and green. I closed my eyes, puffed out my chest, and sucked my lungs full of that fresh-scented air. I could feel the tingling sensations clea...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Narrate Chapter 13 as a bridge between two moral frameworks: Daisy's storm-side mythology (Thor, the Old Man of the Mountains, the pointing stick) and Papa's morning-after work ethic (keep at it, be honest, help arrives unannounced). Show how the dream in the middle secretly connects the two.
Discussion Questions
- Jay Berry claims he only reads 'hunting and fishing stories' and calls Daisy's books 'girl books,' but by the end of the Thor retelling he is asking to borrow the book. What does Rawls reveal about how boys in this time and place learned to conceal their own curiosity, and what breaks the concealment down?
- Daisy refuses to let Jay Berry wake Mama while her leg is hurting badly: 'She has enough to worry about. Besides, she needs her rest.' Construct the strongest possible argument FOR Daisy's silence and the strongest possible argument AGAINST it, then decide which is more persuasive in this particular family.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Without flaw or defect; exactly as it should be.
Item 2
Swelled or inflated outward, usually by drawing in breath.
Item 3
The upper front part of the body between the neck and the stomach, enclosing the heart and lungs.
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Critical Thinking
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