Spiderwick Chronicles book club
Years ago the fad among book publishing was these cool books with deckle edges, and there is something about books like that which I love (I’ll try to find the meme with that idea). There were several middle grade books in that vein, and while I’m not the age range, I like to keep an eye out for books like that because it’s helpful to be able to recommend books to friends. One of the book series from that bad was the Spiderwick Chronicles. It’s like a book that was tailor-made to appeal to me. Mischievous young children? Check. Faerie lore? Check. Mysterious old Victorian home? Check. Not to mention it had twins in the book, and at the time I had young twins. I was eagerly looking forward to my kids being old enough to read these books. The day finally came, and we turned it into a book and a movie night.
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Spiderwick Chronicles
Okay, the first thing you need to know, the movie is based on the entire 5-book series. These are great early middle-grade books, Each book is probably around 100 pages, and there are several wonderful black-line illustrations.
It’s got a pretty solid storyline in each book, and you could probably read the entire book series in a week if your kid is a fast reader, and two weeks if they read a little slower.
Spiderwick Chronicles book club
Oh wow, I didn’t realize this series was 20 years old. That’s just weird to think of. Apparently to go with the 20th anniversary Simon & Shchuster is releasing all sorts of new tie-ins, mainly new editions and a boxed set. But, because of that, there are a few new things out.
First, the author has a discussion guide for the series.
But getting into more sources I found:
- Spiderwick Chronicles book lists
- Simple book club with a few craft ideas and some vocabulary
- Hmmm, there really isn’t a lot out there. I may need to add this to my list of books to create my own
My theory basically goes, if none of the places I trust to write a good book club has it, then I need to write my own. But, I have a very long list of things I need to write. Very long list.
So, I’m writing about this like 8 years after we completed this book club, because for some reason I never wrote about it, and I discovered this in the bowels of my “things I want to write about,” and said, “How in the world did I not already write this?”
As I recall at the time we read the books, the kids got very into faerie lore, and we checked the Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide out from the library so many times, and I eventually bought the book to save on late fees. It still sits up on my bookshelf.
I do remember lots and lots of nature walks where we pretended to find fairy houses, and I think it was around the time the Zilker Botanical Gardens had one of their fairy houses (the image I used for the post) on the trails there, so we excitedly found many different “houses” and “fairy evidence.”
Spiderwick Chronicles book club snacks
Man, now I want to rewatch the movie and reread the books. So many good books to read. I’m currently reading a 12 Dancing Princesses rewrite I picked up ages ago and forgot to read.
This was clearly before I was trying to create a meal with the movie, so this is a lot of snack food.
- honey- in the books, honey is used to calm brownies, and so we used teddy grahams honey
- fog- fog is a key element in the books, and we grabbed some dry ice and a soda to create a fun drink
- good brownie- was gingerbread men
- evil brownie- sourpatch kids
- seeing stone- powdered sugar donuts
- Field Guide- Hershey nuggets made to look like books
- cold iron- oreos dipped in candy melts (I combined vanilla and chocolate to great a gray color) to look vaguely like iron
- fencing sword- pretzel stick dipped in candy melts
All in all, this was a fun movie night, and I really need to go back and reread the Spiderwick Chronicles because it was such a fun series.
More 4th-grade learning fun
The Spiderwick Chronicles book club was part of our 4th grade year, so let’s see what else I have squirreled away in there.
- Skeleton Unit
- Joan of Arc lesson
- Pippi Longstocking book club
- Holes book club
- Pompeii archeology dig
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