Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Modern Fantasy (Chapter Book)

Charlie is a young boy who lives with his mother, father, and both sets of grandparents. They are very poor, and often do not have enough food or money for all seven of them. Charlie hears stories from his Grandpa Joe about the mysterious chocolatier Willy Wonka, who closed his factory one day and never told anyone why. Suddenly the factory is open again, but no one is ever seen going in or out and the world is very confused about who is making all the chocolate. One day Willy Wonka announces he is holding a world-wide contest: he is putting five golden tickets in his chocolate bars and the lucky five children to find them will get a tour of the factory and chocolate for life! Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Mike Teavee, and Violet Beauregarde are the first four to find golden tickets- and Charlie is the lucky fifth! On their tour of the factory crazy things happen, and by the end Charlie is the only child left. Willy Wonka tells him that he has won the contest, and the factory is now HIS when Wonka decides to retire!

I would use this book to teach context clues. Roald Dahl likes to use made-up words, especially in this book, so I think it would be a really good book to use to teach them how to look at the context of sentences. I could pull out a few sentences after reading a chapter and ask them to tell me what they think the made-up words are. This book would also be a fun way to teach students how to summarize. The things in the story that happen are so crazy that I think they would have more fun reading and summarizing with a book like this than with simple texts that they consider "boring."

For one of my technology integrations I chose to use Wordle.net, a site that generates word clouds from text. To get this specific word cloud I typed the chapter "The Golden Tickets" from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into Wordle. I think it would be neat to show this to students and ask them what they think the main idea of the chapter is or even have them write summaries and type those into Wordle and discuss why they think the words that are the biggest ended up that way.