1. When you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up? 2. Has this changed now that you are older?
3. Was there anything that you believed when you were younger that you no longer believe?
Understand
1. What is the name of the narrator’s grandfather? 2. What does the narrator tell us about his grandfather’s life? 3. How did the narrator’s grandfather encourage his passion for discovery? 4. What did the narrator decide to become when he was six? 5. What were the narrator’s parents worried about? 6. What does the narrator’s mother sit him down to tell him?
Explore 3 1. What kind of person was Grandpa Portman, in your opinion?
2. Were the speaker’s parents right to be worried that his grandfather would infect him ‘with some incurable dreaminess’ that he would never recover from? Explain your answer.
3. Do you agree that you cannot be an explorer in this day and age? Why or why not? 4. (a) Rewrite the first two paragraphs of this extract as a third-person narrative. (b) What are the advantages and disadvantages of first-person narratives?
Create
1. ‘Everything in the world has already been discovered.’ Imagine that you have discovered a new country. Draw a picture of what you envisage this new country to look like.
2. Work in pairs to write the dialogue that took place between the boy and his mother when she told him that he could not become an explorer. When you have finished, act your dialogue out for the rest of the class.
In first-person narratives the story is written in the first person (I) and told from the point of view of a character who is involved in the story.
