Local authors help school raise funds for seriously ill children

On Friday, Tavistock and Summerhill School in Lindfield was buzzing with Mathildas, Big Friendly Giants, Willy Wonkas, and Twits for Dahlicious Dress Up Day, a charity fancy dress fundraiser for Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity www.roalddahlcharity.org. Local authors Dr Robert Hodgkinson (Henry and the Alphabet Spaghetti) and Alison Milford (A Children’s History of Sussex and writer for the Oxford Reading Tree) and former parent, Marilyn Bradley judged the fancy dress competition. Afterwards there was special Dahl themed quiz and lunch.

This was the culmination of a week of activities to celebrate 30 years of Roald Dahl's BFG.

On Monday the children took part in a live pod cast featuring author Michael Rosen (Roald Dahl’s biographer), Quentin Blake - the illustrator who bought all of Roald Dahl’s characters to life and David Walliams - reading the dream chapter from the BFG dressed as the Big Friendly Giant himself. The children voted for their favourite Roald Dahl characters and their suggestions were sent in to the pod cast team before the event. As the BFG is a dream weaver, following the podcast, the children described their favourite dreams.

 “Fantastically fabulous fun!” commented the Head, Andy Giles, “This is a great opportunity to enthuse the children to about reading, have fun and help children less fortunate than themselves”