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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the clearest interior passage in the chapter — the moment Jay Berry's body stops him from running and then his mind slowly reboots. Rawls moves through three mental states in five sentences: frozen (paralyzed, trance), returning (dawned on me, noticing), deducing (he was bluffing). Copying it trains 7th-9th graders to see that a character study is really a sequence of cognitive shifts, not a list of feelings.
Usually when I got scared I could almost outrun my shadow, but I was beyond being scared, I was paralyzed. All I could do was stand there like I was in a trance, hold onto my net, and stare at that bi...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 7 in one well-built paragraph. Track the arc from confidence (pre-dawn preparation) to triumph (two monkeys in the net) to collapse (the ring opened) to return (walking home with Rowdy).
Discussion Questions
- Rawls structures the chapter around three kinds of intelligence: Jay Berry's (reactive), Rowdy's (instinctive), and the big monkey's (strategic). Which kind does the chapter treat as the most dangerous — and why does that matter in a story written for young readers?
- Consider Jay Berry's tug-of-war with the big monkey. He thinks they are fighting over the net, but the big monkey is actually doing something else. What is the big monkey doing, and what does Jay Berry's misreading reveal about how humans tend to interpret an opponent's actions?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
unable to move because of fear, shock, or physical injury
Item 2
a dazed, half-aware state in which ordinary responses stop
Item 3
pretending to be stronger or more dangerous than one really is in order to scare an opponent
+ 5 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
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