George, an 8 year old boy was constantly nagged, bossed and bullied by his grandmother. One day when his parents left to get groceries, George took the advantage of this opportunity to take revenge against his grandmother. He decided to create a magic potion to replace his grandma’s medicine just a revenge but to not to hurt her in the end. George decided to put everything into a pot to treat her grouchiness. From toothpaste, shampoo, shaving soap, face cream, hair remover and many more making the medicine brown like her medicine. However, this fiscal does not stop. Things got out of hand where George’s potion created something bigger than he imaged.

This book is infamous for its fantasy and creativity. As well, the intention of this book is created through Dahl’s respect to doctors and pioneers to new medicine. Therefore, I believe this book could make students to enjoy many aspects of stepping out of their  comfort zone in taking risk to try new things. Such as, create new science experiments. This book showed that if we channel our creativity in wanting change, we could impact our surroundings in anyway. However, there are some certain circumstances that we have to take into account. We have to remind students to NOT make George’s medicine recipe and NOT to poison your family members especially they are frustrated.

For class discussions/ activities, we can encourage students to create connections to the character and empathize with the situation with George’s circumstances.  We can create scenarios on what would we do in George’s situation on how we would felt about creating these medicine. Would we feel happy about this type of action or would you have a sense of regret? Or possibly asking students to rewrite the ending of the story to see to make it “better”?

• Anson W. (JI132)