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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage carries Geppetto's economic ethics into the middle of the chapter. Pinocchio has just landed alone and hungry on a strange island, and Collodi quietly inserts a remembered teaching from his father: only the truly poor, sick, blind, or aged have a right to beg; everyone else must work, and if they refuse to work, hunger is their own fault. The perspiring coal man arrives as the immediate test case. Copying this passage gives the student a model of how a writer can move from a moral principle to an embodied case in a single paragraph break.
Meanwhile he was very hungry because he had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours,—not even a chick pea. What could he do? There were only two ways to get food,—either to beg or to work for it. To ask f...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 24 in five or six sentences, tracing the all-night swim, the Dolphin's news about the Dogfish, the refusals in the Country of the Busy Bees, and the recognition of the Fairy at the table.
Discussion Questions
- Pinocchio swims all night through a storm so violent that the night appears like day, hoping to reach Geppetto in time. How does Collodi use the size and ferocity of the storm to picture the change in Pinocchio's character — and why is the all-night swim more important than any speech Pinocchio could make about his love for his papa?
- The Dolphin's description of the Dogfish (as large as a five-story house, mouth wide enough to swallow a train) is delivered in the same conversation in which Pinocchio learns Geppetto's boat has likely sunk. What does Collodi gain by placing the biggest fear and the deepest love in the same sentence, and how does this pairing prepare the reader for events later in the novel?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Filled with life or motion by an inner force; here, driven on by hope.
Item 2
Brilliant magnificence or radiant beauty; here, the full glory of the sun after the storm.
Item 3
Lived in by people or creatures; populated.
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Critical Thinking
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