Reading Roald Dahl: How to Celebrate in Cross-curricular Style
September is Roald Dahl month, and it will be 105 years on 13 September since he was born. This is a fabulous opportunity to allow children to realise that stories we love in English are loved in other languages too! So, we have devised some activities to celebrate the occasion – the Popcorn Birthday Cards are brilliant specifically for his birthday, and What’s the Story is great for cross-curricular discussion of which Dahl book is best!
Popcorn Birthday Card Celebrations
Have you seen our Roald Dahl adjectives and pop corn birthday card resources in the PLN VLE Seasonal Specials Aut 1? pic.twitter.com/HqsdOTtjUX
— Janet Lloyd (@JanetLloydnet) September 12, 2016
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1. Ask the children to think of adjectives to describe the characters in one or more of Dahl’s stories. Write them up in English on the board.
2. Select the best ten adjectives.
3. Which of these adjectives do the children already know in the target language?
4. Using bilingual dictionaries look up the adjectives that the children do not already know.
5. Write up these 10 adjectives on the board next to the meaning in English.
6. Write the adjectives on pieces of paper and then scrunch them up, and pop them in a box, like popcorn. Play a game of Roald Dahl popcorn charades. Can the children take it in turns to take a scrunched-up piece of paper and act out the adjective so the class can guess the meaning, and locate the target language adjective?
In the style shown in this Tweet, ask the children to make their own popcorn style birthday cards for Roald Dahl. They can include their five favourite adjectives from the list you have made, as ‘whizz pop banger words’, which are zooming out of the popcorn box.
We adore these 'popcorn portraits' produced by Yrs 5and 6 at St Ann's in Sheffield with one of our teachers, @Coxynat to revise last year's learning. They describe the children's favourite book characters. Find the activity in the LEAP resources on the VLE. pic.twitter.com/NczPbOXXEM
— Primary Languages Network (@network_primary) September 22, 2020
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What’s the Story?
1. For a reading recognition activity, a simple idea is to share the front covers of Dahl's novels in the target language, and ask the children to decide what the title in English of each book must be. Many of the foreign language covers are still recognisable, so this is a good way to introduce young learners to unfamiliar language.
2. To practice speaking and listening skills, make a class survey as to which is their favourite Dahl book. Make the survey a simple tally, where children interview each other and ask each other which their favourite book is – use the titles that you have already introduced in ‘What’s the story?’, so the children are familiar with the titles!
3. A good way to get some bilingual dictionary work in class is to build an adjective profile of some of the most famous Roald Dahl characters. This activity can then be developed into creating full sentence descriptions of these figures for more advanced learners.
4. Ask the children to pick their favourite character, and to draw their silhouette outline. Then, get the children to fill the outline with adjectives that make up the character's personality. Encourage more advanced learners to expand to include adverbs and more interesting verbs. This activity can be further developed into a character identity parade, with the children introducing and describing their silhouettes in either the first or third person singular.
For those with access to the VLE, resources to support with these activities are located under Autumn Term 1 in Seasonal Specials.