Children’s Literature Lesson: Giants and Snozzcumbers
Hello again 
Welcome to another Friday Shades of a Dream Literary adventure with me, Eleanor from Give A Brick. If you’ve been around these parts before, you’ll know that we finished reading Danny the Champion of the World last week. As promised elsewhere, we’re now reading The BFG (The Big Friendly Giant), a personal favourite of Heather I’m told.
Personally speaking, his rich palette of is one of the delights of the genius that is Roald Dahl. Have you read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? That was my daughter and my first shared reading experience and it was refreshing to see the rules of good writing being bent and twisted. I’ve heard it said that you need to know the rules in order to break them. If that is true, Roald Dahl clearly had a good grasp of what should and shouldn’t be done 
I’m sure there’s a lesson in there for the bloggers amongst us but I digress.
First, a little scene setting. Sophie is a small orphan girl who has been taken by the BFG to his cave in giant land. The other giants with whom he is in residence take it upon themselves to fill their tummies with humans (affectionately called human beans) but our friend prefers to dine on a diet of foul tasting greens known as snozzcumbers. I’m told they taste like fish skins and have been known to make full grown giants lose the contents of their rather large mouths. Sophie however, is unimpressed with talk of snozzcumbers. She says there is no such thing. The BFG has something to say about that!
The BFG looked at Sophie and smiled, showing about twenty of his square white teeth. “Yesterday,” he said, “we was not believing in giants, was we? Today we is not believing in snozzcumbers. Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing. What about for instance the giant squizzly scotch-hopper?”
“I beg your pardon?” Sophie said.
“And the humplecrimp?”
“What’s that?” Sophie said.
“And the wraprascal?”
“The what?” Sophie said.
“And the crumpscoddle?”
“Are they animals?” Sophie asked.
“They is common animals” said the BFG.
Literary life lessons aside, you’ve got to just love the language! Fabulous 
But aside from the glorious language, what do you think? Reading this with my seven year old, we entered into a conversation about how sometimes we don’t have to see a thing to know that it is there. Love was our agreed example. When was the last time someone presented you with a gift wrapped parcel of love? I gave her a more scientific and concrete example too, electricity. Like love, we can only see the effects of electricity’s presence. It’s absence is very obvious too, especially on a dark, cold night
Having just read a wonderful post that discusses the power of the human mind and something called our Reticular Activating System, I’ve been thinking a lot about how unseen, and often unacknowledged, things can effect our day to day activity. Seeing really shouldn’t be believing. I could fill a small book with examples of occasions where unbelievable circumstances have prevailed and I’m sure that if you were to start thinking about it, you’d be forced to concur. I’d love to hear about it. Let’s talk
The3dStudio.com
Thanks for the very kind link!
The mind is a very powerful thing and we can use it to our advantage when we want to
Ben´s last [type] ..Achieve your dreams the Tomato Way!
Not a problem (though you can thank El for that
). The only problem with minds is the ability to ignore them if we choose.
TylinaVespart´s last [type] ..Children’s Literature Lesson: Giants and Snozzcumbers