"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" - 2

Our senior Book Worms continued reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, beginning with a story about a queer Indian prince, continuing with the strange observation that the amazing factory never had any workers entering it or leaving it and yet it churned out delicious chocolate, and ending with the exciting announcement that Mr. Willie Wonka would be hosting five lucky children on a tour of his scrumptious factory.

After listening intently, the children were prompted to ponder over the story of the strange prince, who had Mr. Wonka build him a chocolate palace to live in. The magnificent palace eventually melted in the summer heat. What would have happened if someone in Karachi had commissioned a similar home? The following is the outcome of our Book Worm members imagination:

The group of smaller bookworms started their reading by following the mischief of Peter the rabbit. One day, Peter’s mother sent him and his sisters off to woods to look for some berries. Sisters, as good little rabbits, listened to their mommy, while Peter right away decided to go for some forbidden enjoyment – farmer McGregor’s garden. Peter stuffed himself with fresh and crunchy vegetables so badly that his tummy started aching. And, if that was not bad enough, the farmer McGregor noticed him and started chasing him all over the garden. Only barely did Peter make it out of the garden unharmed, although he had to part from his shoes and jacket, which he lost in fleeing from Mr. McGregor. As we read the book, bookworms took turns lifting the flaps of the book and searching for the hiding places of Peter the rabbit on every page – that was fun!

In the second book, we got to meet Poldy, the scarecrow, and his friends birds, along with whom we learned about colours. Poldy and his friends landed in a dark jungle, where they suddenly saw splashes of colours all around them. They discovered that these bright colours belonged to parrots, so that they can recognize each other in the dark jungle. Later, they met two children, who taught Poldy more about colours and even coloured his body and clothes with all sorts of beautiful colours. However, accidently, Poldy fell into water and all his colours got washed away.

As we read about the beautiful parrots, we had some discussion about these birds. It turned out that at home Aasiya had four nice parrots of her own! Noor had just the day before visited a family, which also had a parrot, which was flying all over their home! She even told us of the strange noise the parrot was making. We also discussed about how parrots learn to speak. Umm Uzair suggested that they do it very similarly to how babies learn to talk – if they hear some words being repeated over and over again, then they start mimicking these words and eventually learn to speak them. She also told the bookworms a joke about a parrot.

After reading, bookworms had activity of making their own parrots. They coloured the bodies of the parrots Umm Uzair had prepared for them and then folded from coloured paper wings for them.