A Lesson in Comprehension - James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

We’re done!

We have been working with Henley and a structured school model for about five months as of the end of March of this year, and it’s safe to say she has reached her first academic milestone. In this short amount of time, Henley has learned a TON. She has explored the entire periodic table, gone from just counting 1 to 20 to adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing into the thousands, using fractions and decimals, learned to write in lowercase letters, and well, you get the idea. She has amassed a stockpile of knowledge. However, all of the above material is progressive. Everything she learns one day carries over to the next, and it seems more fluid and continuous. There aren’t defined benchmarks, not that we’ve set anyway, to say for instance, “You now comprehend addition! You’re done learning how to add!” She’s going to learn more concepts in math and continue to apply addition to those concepts, so it doesn’t feel like these parts of her education have that sense of accomplishment. But, outside of these continuing education topics, we finally did it! We completed a full lesson. It’s over! We did it! Let’s celebrate! 

Over the last month, we have pushed Henley’s reading past what we thought was possible - something you will rarely hear us say. We challenged her reading skills with more difficult words, longer chapters, and more complex stories. We challenged her listening and comprehension skills, too.

As you read through our website and about Henley, you’ll see that every day Henley does work she gets to choose the subjects she wants to work on for the day. You will also see that there is an asterisk, and that is for John and I to make executive decisions. During March, we decided that we wanted to read to Henley as part of her work time. This was never a part of work before, never an option, but we threw it on the table to see what would happen. 

We chose James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl as the first book to use in this way. We will admit, although John said he had never read this book before, he was quite skeptical of my decision because of what he remembered about the ages of kids reading this book from his childhood. For my part, I couldn’t be talked out of this specific book. In elementary school, my fourth grade class was able to put on a production of the play, and that has stuck with me ever since. (I was the Earthworm, wrapped in a pink sheet, and I remember my teacher always telling me to talk slower). This was also one of only a handful of books that we could both name specifically from each of our childhood elementary school curriculums, so we went with it. 

Have you read James and the Giant Peach? How old were you? Do you remember anything about it? Let me tell you, it’s long. The words are in a teeny tiny font, and there are only a handful of black and white pictures that qualify more as sketches. We read all sorts of different books, but this was straying pretty far from the norm for us. These two parameters, tons of words and tiny font, meant Henley would either have to listen intently or try to read and follow along on a page with hundreds of words - both daunting tasks. I think the longest book we’ve ever read together had a few hundred words total. So now the stage is set! This is how we got through James and the Giant Peach. . .

Because of type of book it is, with these challenges staring down at us, we made sure that it was clear that this book was work. It wasn’t a book we could read over dinner, or snuggle up with on the couch, and not a book that we’d finish in one sitting, let alone one day. This book was serious business. 

We started by only reading one chapter out loud to Henley each day. One chapter ranged from just a couple of pages to five or more pages - the equivalent of the “normal” length of a book we’d be reading together. This led us on a little tangent, and and we’ll take you on that journey now, too.

At the end of the first chapter, I dog-eared the page where we ended so that we’d know where to start whether it was me or John reading to Henley. Bad idea. TERRIBLE idea. Henley started to cry. Sometimes this girl can be so sensitive. I mean, we have had the “treat your books with respect” talk a few times, but I was only trying to help! I tried to explain that when you get older the books you read get longer and it can be difficult to remember what page you just finished - but this concept made no sense to Henley because we've always finished every book we’ve ever started and never needed to know the exact place we left off. I took for granted a bit that we sometimes teach lessons, like respect for your books, in absolutes and forget about the gray areas that kids don’t understand right away. Also, she told me she has a great memory and proceeded to recount the time that John helped chop a branch off an old tree in a friend’s yard to make way for a new avocado tree. This happened over a year ago, maybe even two years ago. What was more interesting than her great memory though, was the memory itself and why, perhaps, she was bringing it up at this exact moment. I think they have something in common! The page was being “hurt” and the branch was, too. She’s always loved trees, and she’s always loved books. I think this was her way of telling us that she wanted to treat her books with the utmost respect. Anyway, I finally taught her about bookmarks and that set up the next part of the day.

We spent the rest of work that day making a bookmark. Cutting a rectangle out of a white sheet of paper. Drawing hearts on it. Making sure to color each one in with different color “love” stripes. I’m not joking. This took an hour. And now . . .

Back to the book! Chapter 2. James and the Giant Peach is. . .slow. It uses weird words. It also uses words we don’t use in our house (words like “hate”). They might be appropriately applied in the context of the book, but we weren’t quite ready for some of these ideas to be part of Henley’s vocabulary. This led to a second tangent. 

Why can we read books with words in them that we’re not allowed to say? For this subject, we talked about the author needing their audience to feel something. It’s easy if Daddy says he doesn’t like mayonnaise (also something I don’t understand). We all know he hates it. He would get up from his chair and run to the nearest sink to wash out his mouth if mayonnaise ended up on his sandwich if he could. But if an author writes, “John doesn’t like mayo,” we might not even take this detail in. She seemed fine with this explanation, thank goodness, though we did continue to have the same talk EVERY time an instance like this occurred. We really had to take time to learn about everything. Which aunt is whom? How do their names match their bodies? Why are ladybugs called ladybirds? How do spiders make silk? A million questions.

Back to the book, again! The book is still slow. From the time the book begins to the time James enters the peach is over 10 chapters and 30 pages into the book. For us, that was almost two weeks into reading a book that has the word ‘peach’ in its title. This made me really nervous. What if Henley’s imagination wasn’t captured? Would she even want or care to get through this? There were so many details and so many nuances that made the book feel like it was dragging its feet in the sand behind us as we tried to carry it on across the desert. And maybe this is just me reading a children’s book in my 30s and being disconnected, but I wasn’t convinced I made the right first choice for this type of learning. 

So as to not slow the book down even more, at the end of every chapter - never before - we talked about what happened to encourage the flow. 

L: “What happened to James’ parents?” 

H: “They were eaten.”

L: “By what?”

H: “Uuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmm. . .”

(PS, if you haven’t read the book or don’t remember, James’ parents die from being eaten by a rhino in the first 30-something seconds. Go figure.)

And so, another lesson unfolded. I thought Henley was listening, but I couldn’t get her to recall all of the details. Before I could feel frustrated, I tried another way of asking her questions. I gave her choices! As soon as I did this, Henley was on a roll. She could tell me literally anything I asked, and that is the system we maintained throughout the entire book. 

Taking this approach demands that you stretch your imagination far beyond any fairytale and you have to be ready to take these wild turns. As soon as the peach started rolling down the hill, I knew Henley was invested, and once again, so was I, because, guess what?! That’s the last thing I remembered about the book. The moral: take your time reading new books, it’s ok to be weary.

As we read through this book, we also delved into other areas like shapes, shading, and drawing. As soon as the peach was full grown, Henley wanted to draw it to see how big it really was (the size of a house!). We also learned that the peach rolls right through a chocolate factory. Did you remember that?! Henley obviously loved this part, and that prompted John to slowly start introducing Henley to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as rotational energy. He’ll cover teaching physics in a later blog. 

There were definitely times that Henley needed prompting when discussing James and the Giant Peach. The ideas of morals and heroes were all new to her, and while we did touch on them, I decided that the goal of reading this 150 page book wasn’t to teach Henley about James’ character and his growth throughout the book (though in time, I’m sure we will go back and discuss this), but to teach her about different types of books. 

There were also times when Henley was infatuated with the book. On Fridays, when John teaches Henley at home, she would recap the last few days of reading so that he knew what was going on. This was extremely unexpected because we never built that aspect of reading into this model, and he never asked her for the summaries. There was no prompting, and it turned out to be extremely helpful because he literally had no idea what was going on in the book. Side note - I also think he questioned if Henley got the story right because it is so far-fetched. “1000 seagulls holding up the peach and flying across the ocean? Sharks? A centipede with only 42 feet and who is purple?” Roald Dahl is still magic.

Remember I said as we started the book, Henley was mostly listening as I read? Well, as we moved towards the middle of the book, she would be asking me to stop and show her where I was because she lost her place. I stopped for a second and did a quick inventory of how we read and where she sits and where her face and eyes were. Check, check, check, and check. I never intended for Henley to read this book, but in the end, that’s exactly what she was doing. And all on her own. We took a book that should be impossible for a three year old and guided her through a magical journey.

Henley’s peach, pre James and the Giant Peach