Henry and the Chalk Dragon Book Club

First of all, this book is a delight!  It is funny and insightful and is a great read-aloud!  It also made for a really fun book club!

For decorations, I cut stars and a few snowflakes out of colored construction paper and hang them as streamers from the ceiling (ending with a snowflake at the bottom of each one).  I also printed out some of my favorite quotes from the book to hang around the room.

The boys and I made some slime to be the giant slimy slug.  I really wanted to put it on our windows, but it wouldn't stick, so it ended up on some wax paper, which turned out to be fun because especially the younger ones had a fun time playing and poking and stretching it!

My son loves to make some form of drawing or banner for the book clubs.  He felt rushed on this one and doesn't feel it is finished, but I think it looks great.  It's the dragon when it is a boat sloshing through the halls of La Muncha Elementary!

Of course, the octagon ate the circles out of my welcome sign. ;)

I had some random colored scraps from cutting the stars and snowflakes that turned into perfect shapes and colors to scatter on our table.

My boys and I had also made these posters as we discussed the book, so we hung them up for the club.  (I suggested listing Henry's chivalry; the boys wanted to also make a list of Oskar's insults!)

My kids absolutely love the excuse to dress up for book club.  

The costumes didn't last very long because wearing raincoats covered in foil is actually tremendously HOT!

I had to include a few photos of some others from book club who got in the spirit of dressing up!

One of the moms wore a name tag that said "Sally (the) IV."  I love my clever friends!

 As the kids were arriving, I had a little area set up for them to take photos in front of the chalk wall (and add some art to it) and pose with a special smile that they wrote on a chalkboard.  I had lists of some of Miss Pimpernel's and the dragon's smiles they could use or think of their own.

That is, obviously, Oscar on the left, complete with button-down shirt, holding his pet octagon and making a "dragon" smile!

Once everyone had arrived, we gathered the kids together to share some "Unusual Pets."  I had asked them to think of these ahead of time, and we used the page from the curriculum guide available on Jennifer Trafton's website.  The kids had some fun pets to share!

One of the many fun things about this book is that is makes so many delightful references to other great classic and other fun literary works. So, we gathered in two groups and set a timer for 5 minutes to see which group to come up with more references from the book that were about other literary works.  (A mom was the scribe for each group to keep up with what was being said.)

Our main activity was to create our own artistic masterpiece--a dragon, of course!

Just as in the book the dragon got erased until it was down to very little of it left, I started us with a bumpy green shape that needed rescuing with our art!  (It was an old plastic tablecloth stuffed with newspaper and looked eearily like a human body bag as I was preparing for book club!)

Each family was assigned a part of the dragon to create from a stash of supplies.  It was a bit of glorious chaos for awhile (which I could embrace knowing I had help for clean-up!)...

...but it was definitely a fantastically fun masterpiece once we put it all together!  (Practical note: It would have served us well to leave more time for glue to dry somehow before trying to put the pieces together!)

A few close-ups of our work...

We had a wonderful discussion about the book, which I always enjoy doing with the kids!
The kids shared a ton of favorite and funny parts!  And, they shared about friendship and fears and characters they identified with.  With a younger group and lots of sharing, the one question that we didn't get to talk about that I think would be a wonderfully fascinating discussion is a quote from the book itself:  Are real and true the same thing?

And, last but certainly not least...FOOD!

Of course, we had to make pepperoni pizza our main course, which is not an easy task here in Nepal, but I found pepperoni to slice and made up some pizzas.  I did not catch any photos as we pulled them out of the oven!

Friends brought amazing vegetable art!

Carrot Alligators in a veggie swamp!

Veggie Rainbows!

My boys insisted that we needed to include some scrambled eggs since they were spooning that into the dragon's mouth in the book while they all prepared to remake him.

There was not much mentioned in the book in the way of desserts, but there are a lot of references to sunsets and sunrises and lots of mention of similes and metaphors, so I decided to make some sunset metaphor cupcakes.

Sunset seemed sort of tropical to me, so I used this recipe for pineapple cupcakes with coconut buttercream frosting and roughly the idea from this recipe but much less precise in execution. ;)  I can't get cupcake liners here usually, so the outside of the cupcakes all got rather tan, but if you cut them open, you could see the attempted sunset.

We had a wonderful time celebrating this delightful book.  If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend it.  You can find it at The Rabbit Room Store.