Roald Dahl Day takes place annually on 13 September, so why not try some of these ‘whizzpopping’ ideas in your STEM lessons? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl’s stories have inspired generations of children, filled with extraordinary ideas, whimsical worlds and unbelievable inventions.

Despite Roald Dahl having enjoined his publishers not to "so much as change a single comma in one of my books", in February 2023 Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books, announced it would be re-writing portions of many of Dahl's children's novels, changing the language to, in the publisher's words, "ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today." [8] The decision was met with sharp criticism from groups and public figures including authors Salman Rushdie [9] [10] and Christopher Paolini, [11] British prime minister Rishi Sunak, [9] [10] Queen Camilla, [9] [12] Kemi Badenoch, [13] PEN America, [9] and Brian Cox. [13] Dahl's publishers in the United States, France, and the Netherlands announced they had declined to incorporate the changes. [9] Charlie, George, Matilda, James and Danny all find themselves in situations where they have to use their intelligence and imagination to overcome problems, which can lend themselves so fantastically to STEM lessons. Her abdomen begins to swell, and puff out as if she was being forced by air. Her face turns a lime green during this process. And who can blame him? I mean... Quentin Blake's illustrations REALLY show you how disgusting that grandma really is. Left with an ungrateful and rude grandma he decides to start a new medicine to make her less rude and mean. He mixes, shoe polish, jujube fruit juice, some spices, toothpaste, and engine oil. He then boils it and puts it in his grandma's medicine.

Mmmm. I really like Roald Dahl but this book...is a little scary. I wouldn't let my child read it. Introducing the idea into a child's head to create a concoction to add to a liquid medicine someone is currently taking is not something I want to do. She scares George by saying that she likes to eat insects and he wonders briefly if she's a witch. To punish her for her regular abuse, George decides to make a magic medicine to replace her old one. He collects a variety of ingredients from around the family farm including deodorant and shampoo from the bathroom, floor polish from the laundry room, horseradish sauce and gin from the kitchen, animal medicines, engine oil and anti-freeze from the garage, and brown paint to mimic the colour of the original medicine. George's grandma bosses him around. George can't stand his grandmother and how she always treats him badly, so he decided to make a magic medicine to replace his grandma's normal medicine. He goes around his home and collects a variety of ingredients that are not food. He then adds brown paint to make the color the same as the original medicine. Well... This lad George, yeah? He's got no choice. Poor George. That horrible crinkly old bag is so horrible to him! They try it again, but it does not turn out like the first batch did, it only grew the leg. They give the grandma another batch of the medicine and it makes her shrink to the point that no one can see the mean old grumpy lady. Update this section!

When I was twelve years old I gave a mini presentation to my English class about this book. Afterwards it was time for questions, one annoying girl (who looked strangely like Princess Leia from Star Wars) persisted in asking me, several times, if I didn’t realise that this was a “kid’s book.” She couldn’t understand how I could be reading it at my age; she even went as far as to call me childish. I was terribly insulted. I didn’t know how to respond. She went after me and gave her presentation on The Golden Compass which she said, whilst looking at me, with her nose up in the air, was a book for adults. Her mum had read it after all.This story leads to a fantastic opportunity to work with profits and costs. Mr Wormwood explains how he cheats car buyers by adding sawdust to silence the gearboxes. Can children work out his costs and the profits received from his fraudulent cars? I absolutely loved the book, and when I read it I would burst into laughter. This is the second time that I have read this book, and I still enjoy reading it. You can really tell that the writer, Roald Dahl, is on George's side. This is one of my favourite parts of the book, where George doesn't want his grandma to know that he's boiling her up a big surprise. One thing I have noticed when perusing the hundreds of silly changes made in the books (originally reported by the Daily Telegraph) is that many of them absolutely destroy clever things like alliteration, which is something that Dahl employed brilliantly.