Our Year One Innovator is Roald Dahl!
Every year our teachers and students name their classroom after a favourite innovator. It is a fun strategy Kingsgate uses to inspire learning and innovation in our classrooms!
Roald Dahl was a spy, an ace fighter pilot, a chocolate historian and a medical inventor!
He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and a treasury of original, evergreen, and beloved children’s books. He remains for many the world’s No. 1 storyteller.
Born in Llandaff, Wales, on 13th September 1916 to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, Dahl was named after Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who had been the first man to reach the South Pole just four years earlier. A heroic start in life. But his early years were blighted by the tragic deaths of his older sister, Astri, and his father.
Wanting the best for her only son, his mother sent him to boarding school – first to St Peter’s, Weston-super-Mare; then, in 1929, to Repton – where many bizarre and memorable events would later be recounted in Boy. Pupils at Repton were invited to trial chocolate bars, a memory that stayed with Dahl throughout his life, inspiring Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 
In 1961 James and the Giant Peach was published in the US, followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roald then wrote screenplays for the James Bond hit You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as well as adult novels such as Kiss Kiss. Fantastic Mr. Fox was published in 1970, the year before the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released. The rest of the decade saw the publication of many other classics, including Danny the Champion of the World, The Enormous Crocodile, and My Uncle Oswald.
Roald also enjoyed enormous success on television. Having already had his stories told in six episodes of the award winning US series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his Tales of the Unexpected ran for several series between 1979 and 1988 in the UK.
In the early 1980s he published The Twits, Revolting Rhymes, The BFG and The Witches. There followed two autobiographical books: Boy, in 1984 and Going Solo, in 1986. Matilda was published in 1988, Esio Trot in 1990, and finally, in 1991, came the posthumous delight of The Minpins.
Roald Dahl died on 23 November 1990, aged 74. He was buried in the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Missenden – the Buckinghamshire village where today The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre continues his extraordinary mission to amaze, thrill and inspire generations of children and their parents.
Innovators innovate — that is, they create new ideas or ways of doing things.Anyone who blazes a trail into new territory can be an innovator — athletes, artists, business people, and chefs, to name just a few. We know that Kingsgate students are destined to be innovators in the future because our classroom practices guide and inspire innovation!
Roald Dahl certainly inspires and entertains people. We just love his books?
Our Year One Classroom was named “Roald Dahl” in his honour!
Ms Shauna Wilson and the children are very inspired by him!
Would you like to learn more about Roald Dahl?