Reading Aloud in the Classroom: Roald Dahl's The BFG Is a Bit Long for Beginners

I made the resolution this school year to read out loud to my students every day. There are many reasons for this. Important reasons, in my opinion. For one thing, reading aloud fosters a love for reading in children and young adults. It models reading as a positive behavior. And it helps raise test scores, makes kids more successful in school, and increases their vocabulary. I've always been an avid reader; Jim Trelease and his amazing book The Read Aloud Handbook showed me why I had to read aloud to my students, too. We started with Roald Dahl's The BFG, then moved to the short novel Mick Harte Was Here by Junie B. Jones series author Barbara Park. We are now mid-The Hunger Games in one of my classes. (The others are still reading Mick Harte.)

The BFG is, like most of Dahl's writing, full of fantasy and other-worldly creatures. BFG is an acronym for Big Friendly Giant, a lonely being whose days are spent trying not to become a non-friendly giant. The other nine giants who live in the aptly-named Giant Country survive by eating "human beans." The BFG, on the other hand, understands this is wrong and therefore exists on the "filthsome" snozzcumber, a repulsive vegetable only found in Giant Country. His fellow giants sleep by day and travel all over the world by night, snatching children and adults from their sleeping beds to gobble up. The BFG, on the other hand, travels to Dream Country, captures good dreams -- also called "phizzwizards" -- and blows them into the bedrooms of sleeping children.

One night, an orphan named Sophie sees the BFG as he slips around London with his dream-blower trumpet. He fears capture -- and placement in a giant-viewing zoo -- if she tells anyone, so he takes her with him back to Giant Country. The two of them forge an unlikely friendship, then come up with a plot to take down the nine man-hungry giants. This plan involves the Queen of England, and is brilliant in its simplicity.

The BFG was probably not the best choice for beginning read-alouds. My students loved the BFG and little Sophie. They liked the invented words Dahl used, and the funny scenes like when the BFG shares "frobscottle" with Sophie -- and they share the resulting "whizz-poppers" (yes, this is a fizzy drink that causes the drinker to pass gas -- a recipe for immediate giggles in a room full of middle-schoolers). They didn't particularly like how long it took for us to read this first read-aloud book. At almost 200 pages, I didn't think of it as a particularly lengthy tale. But I didn't count on how long it would take for me to stumble over all those invented words, not to mention the BFG's poor grammar. For example, a BFG quote (thanks to the blog Terb's World):

"I is never having a chance to go to school. I is full of mistakes. They is not my fault. I do my best."

Overall, the kids ended up loving the Giant and Sophie, as well as the story, but not the amount of time we spent reading it. This was a primary reason for my choosing to read the 88-page Mick Harte Was Here as our second novel. Now, as I stated above, we've chosen to tackle the almost-400-page The Hunger Games. But the kids are seasoned listeners now, and have the ability to listen for longer periods of time than they were at the beginning of the year. I have also had a lot of practice, and that probably makes a difference in my reading-aloud abilities.

Roald Dahl is, of course, the author of the much-loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and The Witches, among many more.