Johnny Tremain book and a movie

It’s time for another book and a movie! This one will work great for your homeschool history if you’re studying American history. Our Johnny Tremain book club gave me a great excuse to do some more with the American Revolution when we weren’t actually studying it for our history that year.

This will also work great if you’ve got young boys because it’s full of all sorts of great things to talk about with them.  Princess liked this book, but nowhere near as much as the boys did.

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Johnny Tremain synopsis

Johnny Tremain* is a silversmith in Boston in 1775.  He’s given a commission to make a difficult pot, and burns his hand.  As Johnny recovers from the burn and learns from his mistakes, and how to rebuild his life, he is swept up into the events leading up to the Revolutionary War.

Johnny Tremain Activities

This particular book and a movie are what led us to outlaw acting out parts of the story for a while because they were just over the top in their “inspiration,” and we had to have a rather long talk afterward.

Superman recreated a scene from the movie using peg dolls and various craft supplies.  I very much appreciated his ingenuity in his project.

Princess made peg dolls also, but she concentrated on the fashion of the time.  Since she is fairly young I was okay with her just drawing from her memory of coloring books she’s seen, but in a few years, I’m going to require some research for a project like that.

Batman was inspired by Angellic Scalliwags’ projects and built a “Johnny Tremain Minecraft world,” but since our version of Minecraft is rather heavily modded, I’d have to say his inspiration was only loosely inspired by the book.  I’ll just say there was a roller coaster and leave it at that.

Johnny Tremain snacks

Since there’s not a lot of food, and I wasn’t particularly wanting to take the boys’ suggestion of fashioning muskets out of icing and pretzels, the snacks are a little limited.

Future Ticia 2022, I added in a few extra snack ideas to round out the Johnny Tremain book club snacks, and also I think they make sense thematically.

• Newspapers to go with Johnny’s second career as a newspaper delivery boy.  The newspapers are graham crackers with marshmallow fluff on top.  Then I piped melted chocolate onto them.
• Bread, because throughout the book Johnny talks about the smell of bread.  I added some cheese fondue to dip it in, because… it’s yummy.
• Fruit, because Johnny worries he won’t get to eat fruit as often with the blockade.
• Fruit punch, it’s a minor part of several scenes in the books.  So much so the kids insisted we HAD to have it for our drink.  It’s made with Sprite and orange sherbet
• musket balls- whoppers
• chicken- a whole chicken because it was a fairly common food

I will say, the Johnny Tremain movie is fairly close to the book, it’s grossly simplified, but unlike most Disney adaptations it’s fairly true to the materials.  We’ve watched it several times since we first did so.

Johnny Tremain discussion questions

There’s a lot of meat to discuss in this book, and I very much encourage anyone covering the Revolutionary War to have their kids read it because of all the great discussions we had.

• How did Johnny contribute to his own problems?
• What faults does Merchant Lyte have?  How do those faults contribute to the story?
• How is Rab different from Johnny?
• How does Johnny’s relationship with Cilla change throughout the book?
• What actions did Johnny take would you find most difficult to do?

Possibly Johnny Tremain research projects

There are a lot of great research projects you could set kids to doing with Johnny Tremain.  Here are a few I thought of as I was writing discussion questions:

• Research historical figures mentioned in the book: Sam Adams and Paul Revere are two prominent characters, there are several others
• Research the Boston Tea Party or Lexington and Concord
• Research the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, Boston geography

More Johnny Tremain resources

• Free Johnny Tremain resources
• Johnny Tremain unit study (this site has dozens of other great studies on it)

More 5th-grade learning ideas

• Earth Science Unit
• Black Cauldron book club
• Circulatory System game
• Age of Exploration Unit
• Candlemaking lesson

Check out my book and an activity board for more book-inspired ideas, and watch for more Book and a Movie ideas as we read more books.

Follow Ticia Adventures in Mommydom’s board book and activity on Pinterest.

“Tea being dumped over the side of the Beaver during the reenactment of the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 2012” by leewrightonflickr is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.