We have just finished reading our class read-aloud Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl. The students laughed and were shocked at the often cruel schooling that Dahl went through in the English schooling system. Hopefully they count themselves lucky that Mrs. Rencher and I don't thrash them and publicly humiliate them for trifling misdeamors!
Boy has been a great read for our class for for several reasons. In our nonfiction unit, we have discussed the definitions of biography, autobiography, and memoir. It gave us a preview of nonfiction writing before the students tackled their own biographies, and we used the book to practice and model finding the main idea of a chapter. The book has connections to Writer's Workshop as well. We began the year by writing about specific memories and moments, and we progressed into writing stories. Boy is a healthy mixture of stories and specific, concise memories. We talked at the end of chapters about whether it would be classified as a story or as a memory.
Have a discussion with your child about Boy and the many lessons we have gleamed from it!
