In June 2000 I received an email from a boy named Evan and his mother Susan describing the Dahl Day that Evan’s teacher organized. It sounds like it was a smashing success! Here’s what they had to say…
From Evan:
Dear Kristine,
We had the best time at our Dahl Day!!!
we ate Snozzcumbers, Mud Burgers, Onion Rings, Hansel & Gretel Ribs, Stinkbugs Eggs, Wormy Spaghetti, Bruce’s Cake, Waspstings, Peach Juice Frobscottle ( which was the best!!) Butterscotch, Frogs Legs, Bunce’s Doughnuts, George’s Soup. We made the Enormous Crocodile that turned out so cool the Middle School Kids used it as a centerpiece for their dance!!!! We had peaches and blueberries.
The news came!! We were on tv at 5:00!!!!
Everyone came in costume. One boy Cale was Willy his Mom made him a great purple coat. My little brother (he’s4) and I came as Oompa-Loompas we even made up a dance! We had 4 Sophies, 4 Matildas, a Mother Christmas, a Spittler (that was Tyler he cut a dinosaur costume apart it was great!) We had a George and Charlie a Mrs. Wormwood a Miss Honey, A BFG, Phillip was The Fox he had the best mask!!
My teacher was Mrs. Prachett we put a hamster in her Sweet Shop!
Our Chokey was a rectangle box spraypainted brown,we poked holes in it but we diddn’t put nails in it!! We painted two refrigerator boxes blue then we stood them up and lettered Sweet Shop on it. My class made candy decorations we glued them on then we asked parents for unusual candy and we had 2 bookcases for the candy shelves we had plastic jarswith the candy in it. At the end of the day Mrs. Pratchett sold us candy we used our money we earned for good behavior and homework.
We finished our quizbowl, my team came in 1st in our division. We got our questions from the Quiz Book and my kids in my class made them up.
Oh we made lickable wallpaper and Bird Pie and Audrey’s mother made Candy coated pencils.
My teacher gave us brown medicine bottles and we had to create our own medicine. We decorated the bottles and wrote information about what our medicine could do. Mine was a pill to make bad people good.
We visited the 1st and 2nd grade classrooms and now all the little kids want to be in Mrs. Rodrigues class!
We hung a turtle(Alfie) and Crocodile pinata from the ceiling. We hung childrens patio furniture upside down from the ceiling (The Twits) and we found a mechanical seagull and hung him also (James).
Our class wrote letters to Mrs. Dahl. Do you know where we could send them so she could read them? I know we can’t have her address but is there somewhere safe to send them to her?
That is about all I can remember. Thank you very much for answering my e-mail, my class will be very excited! If our pictures turn out maybe I could send you some.
From Susan, Evan’s mom:
Thank you for responding to Evan. This unit was so much fun to do. Your web site helped me so much. I spent many late nights on it and always found new interesting information.
Evan’s teacher Mrs. Rodrigues is an exceptional teacher and over the years has done some really neat things with her classes, she told me this was the best thing she ever did with a class. I think this is something her class will remember forever! She was not expecting them to be as excited as they were. She told me everything they did took so long because they wanted their assignments to be perfect. Mrs. Rodrigues (Deb) incorporated a lot of educational ideas into her assignments so creatively they had no idea they were learning ! Do you know if there is a teacher resource book on Roald Dahl? We are considering putting one together. It seemed the more we did the more ideas we came up with. We didn’t even get to half our ideas! Deb is going to start Sept 13 next year with a birthday party to start the unit and take the whole school year. We started about four months ago which wasn’t a lot of time considering how much there is that can be done!
Thank you so much for responding to Evan and for your fantastic web site Mrs. Rodrigues her class and I really appreciate your time and hard work.