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Copywork
About This Passage
Colin and Mary are secretly eating a second breakfast in the garden — eggs roasted in the little oven Dickon built, potatoes, new milk, buns, heather honey, clotted cream — all sent by Mrs. Sowerby so the children won't look suspiciously hungry in front of Mrs. Medlock and Dr. Craven. It's a long list on purpose: Burnett wants you to feel how full they are, how secret it is, and how funny it is that the children push their dinner plates away at the house and pretend to have no appetite.
You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner if you are full to the brim with roasted eggs and potatoes and richly frothed new milk and oatcakes and buns and heather honey and cl...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 24 as the chapter where Mrs. Sowerby sends food to the garden so nobody will find out that Colin is getting well. Tell how Dickon works in two gardens (the secret one and the cottage one), how Mrs. Sowerby notices the children must be growing hungry from all their Magic and exercise, how she sends a basket of milk and fresh buns, how Dickon builds a little oven in a hollow and roasts eggs and potatoes, how Colin and Mary pretend to have no appetite in front of Dr. Craven, and how Dr. Craven finally shrugs and says 'Let them laugh.'
Discussion Questions
- Mrs. Sowerby tells Mrs. Medlock the children may need a little more food because 'they're playin' wi' th' fresh air.' How can you tell from this that Mrs. Sowerby has figured out more about Colin than Mrs. Medlock has — even though Mrs. Medlock lives in the house with Colin and Mrs. Sowerby has never met him?
- Dickon builds a tiny oven out of stones so Colin and Mary can roast their own eggs and potatoes in the garden. What in the story makes you think Burnett wants the reader to see eating in the garden as something special — almost magical — not just a picnic?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A closed box of hot stones or metal that you bake or roast food inside; Dickon builds a little 'oven' in a hollow of rock so Colin and Mary can roast their own eggs and potatoes in the garden
Item 2
A soft loaf made of flour, water, and yeast and baked in an oven; Mrs. Sowerby sends currant buns (a sweet kind of bread) in a basket because she knows the children will be hungry from all their Magic and walking
Item 3
The round, white things a hen lays that you can eat — delicious roasted, boiled, or scrambled; Dickon roasts eggs in his little stone oven and Colin eats them straight from the shell because they taste so good out of doors
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Critical Thinking
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