Roald Dahl Reading Mystery Tour

Over the Bank Holiday I went for a walk in one of our local parks,Tatton Park ,and loved what I found.An outside adventure based on the "Roald Dahl's Tremendous World" to celebrate 100 years since his birth in 1916 . Over the last couple of years some of my colleagues have celebrated Roald Dahl day on 13 September using ideas from a previous blog post Roald Dahl Day and describing characters.

My walk over the  Bank Holiday though was mystery tour, around a park where objects from the stories appeared...so I thought.... why not create a reading mystery tour with simple target language clues? Willy Wonka's special lift , James' giant peach, fantastic Mr Fox's  farmyard or countryside, the Twits' upside down lounge ,Miss Trunchball's office in Matilda......We can investigate adjectives, nouns and modal verbs used with infinitives after the modal verb phrase " you can ...."Here is the sequence of activities .You caa make this a reading challenge indoors with your own picture books or an outdoors challenge (see my suggestion at the end of the blog post for this).

• Share key objects as pictures and make sure the children can associate the object with one of the stories.
• Can the children match the objects to the titles of the stories - titles of the books in the target language ?
• We are working with objects from a story book , so why not make a picture book with the children
• Each object to be stuck on separate pages of the picture book with clear space below for their own target language writing.Leave a little room above the picture.
• The children can add  above the picture the target language book title.
• Next share a list of target language nouns that describe the objects e.g lift , peach , headteacher's office, lounge, farm yard and ask the children using bilingual dictionaries to decide which noun belongs to which picture.  they can then add the target language noun as a label below the picture.
• Give out sentence clues that describe the objects e.g :

"It is a box and it is fast.You can travel in the sky "

It is round and inside a fruit.You can live inside it

It is upside down. You can sit on chairs and you can watch TV here. 

• Can the children investigate the mystery sentences and link them to the correct object?
• Now all they need to do isto  write the sentence next to the correct object in their own picture books.
• Time to create their own sentences too - Thinking of an item or object from a Roald Dahl story ,creating the image, looking up the book title in the target language and then adding a  noun as a label and a descriptive sentence of their own.

Making the task an outdoor mystery tour:

........where the clues lead children in a specific order around a series of pictures of objects outside that they need to photograph or sketch,compile in the correct order next to the clues  and bring back to show you.