Roald Dahl Day

The 13th September is Roald Dahl Story day. Read on for ideas and to see how we celebrate.

The magic of Roald Dahl’s wonderful imagination contributed to many fond childhood memories of being tucked up in bed and being read Roald Dahl stories.

BFG is one of my top 3 childhood books so I am always keen to celebrate Roald Dahl Day. It is of course another excuse to instil the same love of books in my children as I have.

Previous Celebrations

In 2016 we themed our entire summer holidays around Roald Dahl’s 100th birthday celebrations, it was the best summer holiday I’ve ever had. I hope my children will look back at that summer as fondly as I do.

We had so many adventures that summer. Some of the things we did were:

• Completed the entire London Dream Jar trail, often spending 12 hours out exploring and visiting parts of London we’ve never been to.
• Visited the exhibition at the South Bank centre, watched an open air performance of Danny the Champion of the World,
• Watched the BFG film at the cinema
• The children made their own dream jars
• Purchased and set up a Roald Dahl puppet theatre.
• Cooked a Roald Dahl feast at home.
• Created costumes for Roald Dahl day when they went back to school after the summer holidays. This was the perfect way to round off our Roald Dahl summer.

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The nice thing was, with the exception of the exhibition the majority of the activities were almost cost free, a packed lunch, tube fare for me and a few cooking ingredients was the cost of our magical summer.

Roald Dahl Feast

We used recipes from the Roald Dahl cooking books we have, there are options for quick treats right through to full blown feasts.

Each of my children had a book they had to read for homework over the summer holidays. We used these as inspiration for our food choices.

Danny The Champion Of The World – We chose a recipe for Doc Spencer’s Pie from the recipe books. This turned out to be our favourite menu item. It consists of filo pastry wrapped around a ham and egg filling.

BFG – We loved the recipe for a lovely green Frobscottle drink.

The Enormous Crocodile – The original Roald Dahl’s Revolting recipe book contains a rather adventurous enormous crocodile center piece. We attempted it and it’s turned it better than we’d anticipated.

George’s Marvellous Medicine – We made our own throw anything in vegetable soup for this one to make use of ingredients we already had to hand.

The Twits – to finish off our feast we bought some jelly worms and Made some chocolate worm cupcakes.

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Setting The Scene At Home

This year the children won’t be dressing up at school, we will still mark the occasion as I don’t need an excuse for a themed day.

I have gathered up all our Roald Dahl memorabilia, which is a nice collection of bed covers (even the grownups are not too old for a BFG duvet cover), books, toys, tea towels, mugs, stationery and shopping bags. We have grown our collections gradually over the years. It wasn’t until I got it all out together I realised the collection we had amassed.

Having everything out on display helps set the scene and make it a little more excitingly.

Home made posters, bunting and pictures stuck around the home would also set up the theme without going to expense of buying anything specially. I found some lovely printables online when we had our Roald Dahl themed summer.

I have bought some of the new Mr Kipling’s themed cakes for the day and will try and sneak them into their lunchboxes on Friday.

Often there are Roald Dahl books for World book day and Roald Dahl Day. We loved our bargainous £1 limited edition Matilda spin-off book, It is called “Matilda’s How to Be Brave.” This was purchased for Roald Dahl day 2019 in Tesco.

Roald Dahl For Older Kids

Don’t forget Roald Dahl didn’t just write children’s books, when your children outgrow (temporarily of course) the classic Roald Dahl stories they can look forward to reading the adult books. Much to my delight, my eldest studied Tales of the Unexpected in his first year of High school. Other good choices for older children are Boy and Going Solo which are the autobiographies, or you could try Roald Dahl ‘My year’, which was one of the final books he wrote, I am particularly fond of this book and its colourful illustrations.

There are many other Roald Dahl spin-off books available now, I love adding these to our collection. The George’s Marvellous medicine science book came in very useful for the school science fair.

Official Roald Dahl

Have a look at the official Roald Dahl website for more ideas and information about this year’s Roald Dahl story day and other events at the Roald Dahl museum in Buckinghamshire.

What are your favourite Roald Dahl stories? Are you doing anything to mark the day? Leave us a comment and let us know.