Thank You, Roald Dahl

I started Randomly Reading to talk about those books I picked up at random to read.  And I knew that my muse for it would just have to be Matilda.  Like me, she really loved to read, book after book after book.

When I was teaching in public school in the Bronx, I used a passage from Matilda to try to instill a love of reading in my 4th grade students and one of my first assignments was for them to read this passage and tell me in their own word why they read.  Their answers were, to say the least, enlightening.  Some never read, some read only what they had to for school, and maybe one or two would sometimes read for pleasure.

So their first assigned book was a Roald Dahl story and I was always surprised, not because they suddenly became voracious readers, but because they actually read and liked the Dahl book they picked and I thought that was a good start for kids who didn't read because, like most kids, they like playing games more.

So, thank you, Roald Dahl, who knows how many readers you created besides Matilda.

But Dahl's books are also about empowering kids and what better example is there than the wonderful scene from Matilda the Musical of the kids performing a song from the play called Revolting Children as performed during the 2013 Tony Awards:

I loved it!  And if you get a chance Matilda the Musical, I hope you love it, too.