1. The Wish What predictions can you make about this short story from it’s title, ‘The Wish’? What would be your ultimate wish?

2. Exploring Possibilities Using your skills of prediction, you will be shown a series of four cards – each of them focusing on a colour. All of these colours play an important part in the story. Try to predict in groups what each colour might represent? Using the Venn Diagram to help you, consider the possibilities of what each colour might represent individually and then collectively.

3. What might the colours collectively represent?

4. Making imagination become reality Roald Dahl, in The Wish, demonstrates a great ability to allow his characters, and us as readers, to loose themselves in the world of imagination. He demonstrates this, in part, through the colours he chooses to use in this story as metaphors. Dahl, like many great writers succeeds in taking a truly ordinary household item and creating from it an extraordinary world which exists in the imagination of the central character and in the minds of his readers. Now read page 255 of the story to discover what these colours collectively represent. Surprised?

5. Manipulating Reading Skills Which reading skills will be the best to use to establish the meaning of any unfamiliar vocabulary you have just discovered in the passage you have read? What does the boy wish for? Anything else?

6. Reviewing What you have learnt about: a)Roald Dahl’s writing style b) The central character in The Wish?