Family Book Club: Once Upon a Marigold

We recently finished reading Once Upon a Marigold by Jean Ferris for our Family Book Club. It's a fairly predictable Prince meets Princess fairy tale type story.  The kids really liked it.  I didn't love it, but it was okay. It did inspire me with a couple of good activities to do for our Book Club discussion activity though. In the book, Ed, the troll who raises Christian, is well known for messing up common sayings.  For example, he might say "let's get this show on the ball." I've substituted 5th grade several times lately so I knew that Zac's class has been learning about statements like this (idioms) so it fit perfectly with his curriculum and with our book club.  I took index cards and wrote the first half of the idiom on one card and the second half on a different card.  Then I had the kids try to match up the two halves to see if they knew them.  A lot of them were ones they hadn't heard before, but they managed to get them all matched up.  Then we discussed what each of them meant.

In the book Christian is being raised by Ed, the troll, in a cave in the forest, but Ed doesn't want Christian to be barbaric so he finds a manners/etiquette book and makes sure he teaches Christian everything there is to know from which fork is his oyster fork to how to address a duke. There have been a few manners related issues here on the home front that have been bothering me lately, so I found a manners game on Pinterest and then altered it to fit my purposes.  The Pinterest version was only for table manners so I made a few special cards of my own.  For example, "you grabbed something out of someones hand....move back 5000 spaces!" and "You bounced a ball in the house.....you never get to play with a ball, ever, ever again!" Okay, so the punishments are an embellishment, but it's what I felt like saying! Instead they just had to move back a few spaces, which is so much more boring but hopefully still got the point across.

Then we discussed the book for a few minutes.  Usually I talk about the author too but my 2 minute google search didn't net much about the author, so I didn't have a lot to say about her. Then of course we had our treat.  I made artichoke dip because in the book Christian discovers how to eat artichokes and is pretty sure he's the only person who knew that they were edible. It was a bit of a stretch but some books just don't talk about food as much as they should! Garrett didn't care for the dip, but used his newly acquired manners to just have a few bites and then politely refuse any more. The other kids liked it, especially Zac (and ahem....Tyson...who made a sizable dent in the pan by the end of the night!)

Now we are moving on to a book I read about a year ago and loved and wanted to share with the kids. It's called Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. I hope they like it as much as I did!

Memorable Moment: The kids had lots of fun making French Bread Pizza and putting on all their favorite toppings. I love it because it's a super easy dinner!