Where do I start with teaching the book Billionaire Boy?
Start with the big themes that interest your class. Talk about the issues they might feel from the book. Children can worry about being lonely and others not liking them this is always a good place to start and let the kids in your class know that it is a safe space to talk about anything bothering them. Right from Billionaire boy chapter one, you can start discussing the effects of these issues.
The Billionaire Boy plot is quite a unique story and allows the children to understand the characters before any action happens. This means you can use the first few chapters of the book to settle the class into the reading and teach some nice calm starter lessons.
If you are thinking about how to develop the reading into a lesson, I would start by reading a Billionaire boy extract to the class and talking about what happened, discuss any main points and moving on to developing into the lesson.
What topics can I cover with the Billionaire Boy?
There are so many topics, many teachers dismiss this book as light, but there are so many topics to explore. The idea of making friends and being lonely is important and can be explored for PSHE lessons. You can use the amount of money he has and develop it into maths lessons. Expanding into word problems and puzzle solving.
But where Billionaire Boy really shines is with literacy learning. The chapters can be used to teach so many different concepts and topics, Letter writing, story development, play scripts, Billionaire Boy character descriptions, newspaper work, figurative language even dictionary work. Every chapter of Billionaire Boy can be used to teach literacy topics.
Of course, the main one is comprehension, if you are looking for quick exercises to practice comprehension grab these free Billionaire Boy, Comprehension, questions sheets, for after each chapter.
What resources are available for teaching with Billionaire Boy?
I also have free Billionaire Boy chapter worksheets pack, sheets to use after reading each chapter, with comprehension questions on the chapter, vocab questions and chapter exercises.
What comprehension questions can I use with Billionaire Boy?
You can ask different types of reading comprehension questions. You can ask at a word / sentence level – can you find the word on page 11 that means over-excited?
You can ask direct questions from the text – what is the character’s name? These questions the answers are right there in the text.
Slightly harder questions are inferred questions – what does Joe need friends for? – these answers aren’t so obvious and the kids need to understand the story to answer.
And there are review questions – What do you think will happen next? – these questions are more open ended and ask for the kids’ own ideas.
Is Billionaire Boy a suitable class book?
Anyone that has been here for a while will know how much a fan I am of David Walliams. I think Billionaire boy is a wonderful book to use with your class. It is warm and funny and engaging while still challenging developing readers.
As with many of David Walliams’ books, it develops well and pulls the readers in. I also like to read it with my class as the chapters are not too long which makes ending at the right point easier!
What themes are in Billionaire Boy?
There are many themes in the book but I think the most important is friendship, the children in the book become true friends despite being different and that’s an important message for kids. There is also the point that money doesn’t buy happiness and things are not always as they seem.
There are other themes as well such as the importance of sharing and appreciating gifts, these are touched on several times throughout the book but I mainly use the friendship theme when reading with the class.
If you are looking for more tips, resources, ideas and advice about teaching, I recommend reading my blog home page Teaching isn’t easy!
1 comment
p35g05