James and the Giant Peach

Recently we read James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl.  I wasn't sure about it because James' parents are killed by a rhinocerous and so he goes to live with his mean aunts.  James' aunts treat him so meanly in the opening chapters.  There is a lot of name calling and the book mentions that they beat him (although there are no descriptions of the beatings).  I never know how much the girls understand the books we read.  But both of them told me they do not like his aunts and would not want to live with them.  

Early on in the book the giant peach breaks free from its tree and rolls over and kills his aunts.

Once James gets inside the peach, he befriends a bunch of over-sized insects.  There is a lot of infighting and cattiness amongst the insects which I found annoying.  There was tons of dialogue during these sections which made it kind of hard to follow. But, the girls loved this book and kept bringing it to me to read more chapters to them.

I got some peaches from the store, which we cut up and examined with a magnifying glass.  Sabrina and I ate them.  We also made two craft projects based on the story.  Here is the seagulls lifting the peach out of the ocean and the sharks:

Here is the peach impaled on the Empire State Building (we also looked at pictures of that building on line):

We also used clip art of various bugs and made a character poster (I forgot to photograph that).  Lastly, we looked at a globe and located England (where James was from) and New York City (where the peach ended its journey).  We discussed the Atlantic Ocean and ways to cross it.