Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Title: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Chapter Book)
Author: Roald Dahl
Genre: Modern Fantasy

Summary
Charlie Bucket is a young boy who lives with his mother, father, Grandpa Joe, Grandma Josephine, Grandpa George, and Grandma Georgina. The seven of them live a very poor life because Mr. Bucket is the only person in the family with a job. In the evenings, Charlie always goes into the room of his four grandparents and listens to their stories. His Grandpa Joe was always telling him stories about the mysterious Willy Wonka who owned the biggest Chocolate Factory in the world. One evening his Grandpa Joe tells him that one day the chocolate factory had suddenly closed without giving anyone a reason why. Unexpectedly, the factory opens again, people see the smoke from the furnace rising once again, but nobody sees any workers coming in and out of the factory. One day Willy Wonka announces in the newspaper that he is holding a world-wide contest. He is putting five golden tickets in his chocolate candy bars and the five children that find them will have the opportunity to visit the factory as well as be given free chocolate for life. The names of the children who find the Golden tickets are Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee, and Charlie Bucket! The tour of the factory takes place on February 1st, the day after Charlie found the fifth and final Golden Ticket. Charlie decided to bring his Grandpa Joe with him to the factory. While on the tour of the factory, many interesting things occurred: Augustus gets sucked up into a pipe after refusing to get out of the chocolate lake, Violet turns purple and blows up as big as a blueberry, Veruca gets put into the bad nut shoot and ends up in the trash, and Mike shrinks after attempting to end up in a television. By the end of the tour, Charlie is the only child left. Willy Wonka tells Charlie that he has won the contest for being the last one left on the tour and that the prize is that the factory is now his when he decides to retire.



Classroom Connection
To incorporate technology in my classroom I decided to create a wordle that related to a specific section of the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The site www.wordle.net generates word clouds from texts and picks out the most commonly used words. For the wordle I created, I typed the first three paragraphs of the chapter called The Big Day Arrives. The purpose of this wordle was to get an idea of what this chapter might be about, based on the words that popped up in the word cloud.

This would be a fun and interactive technology application to use in the classroom. Students could use this application to make predictions of a particular chapter or section of an article by typing a few sentences or paragraphs into the text box and then letting wordle electronically pick the most commonly used words and display them in a word cloud. Students would then look at these words and try to make a prediction based on them. Another way to use wordle would be to have one student type up a description of a main character in s book and then have another student type up a description of that same character in the same box. Wordle would then take these two paragraphs and find the most common words and display them. Students would then be able to discuss what common descriptions they came up with as a class.