The BFG

Title: The BFG
Author: Roald Dahl
Illustrations: Quentin Blake
Genre: Modern Fantasy

Summary:
The BFG tells the story of a little girl named Sophie. The story begins one night when Sophie is having trouble sleeping. She decides to go look out one of the windows in her orphanage and then her world changes. Before Sophie is a giant! She watches the giant walk down the street and blow something into the windows he passes. Next the giant sees Sophie and kidnaps her. He takes her back to his cave where he explains that what she saw him doing was blowing dreams into the minds of children. He also goes on to tell her that he is the Big Friendly Giant (BFG) and is different than his fellow giants in many ways. For one he does not eat children. Read this book to find out more about the plan Sophie hatches with the BFG, involving dreams, the Queen of England, and stopping the other giants from eating anymore children.

Making the Connection:
This book is great to use when teaching students about context clues. The author utilizes many different nonsensical words in The BFG that can only be defined through the use of context clues. This book is also jam packed with similes, metaphors, and other figurative language; making this a great book to use when introducing these concepts to your class. An important chapter in this book is entitled Dreams. This chapter within itself could provide your class with fun lesson activities. For example you could have your students make their own recipe for a dream. Ask them to make a recipe for a dream. Students could set up their recipes like a cooking recipe with ingredients and mixing instructions. Students should also include a short description of the dream (which could be a "Golden Phizzwizard" or a "Trogglehumper"). When all of the recipes are finished, they could be made into a "Dream Recipe Cook Book". Another idea would be to have your students create a commercial for either Snozzcumbers or Frobscottle. Students would be expected to write a script for their commercial and produce it. This activity would also allow you to intergrate FLIP cams into your classroom.

Technology:
To add a different type of technology to this blog, I decided to make a Wordle for the BFG. I chose to focus on the first page of the Dreams chapter and below is the link to what I created.

The BFG Wordle