E.B. White's story begins will a little girl named Fern Arable who saves the life of a runt of a litter of pigs. She takes care of the pig and names him Wilbur. However, when Wilbur turns five weeks old, Mr. Arable forces his daughter to sell the pig to her uncle, Mr. Zuckerman. Although Fern tries to visit Wilbur everyday, he becomes lonely at his new home until he meets an unlikely friend, a spider named Charlotte. However, Wilbur's life changes forever when one of the old sheep on the farm tells him that Mr. Arable and Mr. Zuckerman plan to kill and eat him at Christmas. Desperate to help her friend live, Charlotte devises a plan to spin the words 'Some Pig' into her web to make Mr. Zuckerman realize he cannot kill Wilbur. Over the course of a few months, Charlotte spins the words 'terrific', 'radiant', and 'humble' to describe Wilbur and attract people from everywhere to come see this extraordinary pig. In the end, the Zuckerman's take Wilbur to a fair where he is awarded a prize for attracting so many people to the fair. Even though Charlotte saves Wilbur's life and spins an egg sac of five hundred and fourteen of her own eggs, she ends up dying alone at the fair. By the next spring, Charlotte's eggs hatch but her most of her baby spiders leave the barn except for three of them: Joy, Aranea, and Nellie. They stay with Wilbur until they have their own children and the cycle continues of new spiders who live in the barn until the end of Wilbur's own life.
In my own classroom, I would use Charlotte's Web as one of the books we would study in my modern fantasy and/or science fiction unit or as a read aloud to the class. The students would have to identify elements of the novel that classify it as modern fantasy (i.e. talking animals). Also, I could have the students study the various types of spiders, such as aeronauts.
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