Roald Dahl Day assembly – resilience
This whole school assembly celebrates Roald Dahl Day on 13 September and is linked to the theme of resilience. It aims to encourage children to think about what resilience means, and to help them create simple strategies to help build resilience to negative opinions, judgements and comments.
The resource comprises teaching notes and a PowerPoint presentation. The assembly is intended to be approximately 20 minutes long.
You may want to display the Roald Dahl books referred to in the assembly, namely: The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox and Matilda. You may also like to play a recording of ‘When I Grow Up’ from Matilda the Musical.
An extract from the assembly:
Share five facts about Roald Dahl:
- He fought in World War Two.
- He wrote many of his stories in a shed at the bottom of his garden.
- He invented over 500 new words! These include whizzpopping, splendiferous, snozzcumbers and disastrophe.
- Many of his characters were based on real people.
- His teachers said that writing wasn’t his strong point!
Ask the children to raise their hand if they are surprised by the last fact.
Explain that even though Roald Dahl was told he was not good at writing as a child, that did not stop him wanting to write and becoming very good at it. In fact, he went on to become one of the world’s most famous writers! This shows he was extremely resilient, which is what we are going to talk about in the rest of the assembly. We are going to talk about what resilience means, and how some of Dahl's characters show resilience themselves.
