Did you know Beverly Cleary turns 100 this month on April 12? I’ve been seeing this bit of trivia pop up all over my Facebook feed, and I thought this was the perfect time to post our Ramona book and a movie night. I very clearly remember reading Ramona as a kid, and loving her crazy antics, I couldn’t wait to share the books with my kids for a homeschool reading assignment.
Well, a few months ago, I got to do just that.
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Assigning the Ramona books to read
This time around, I did something a little bit different. Since the Ramona books are an entire series (and the link goes to all of them) and I was fairly sure the Ramona movie was going to be an amalgamation of all the books, I just checked all of them out of the library. I even had duplicates of some Ramona books.
Then I set the kids loose for a month. I told them, “Read as many Ramona books as you can before the month is over, and then we’ll watch the movie.” Every day I’d hear a new story about Ramona, or they’d tell me how much they sympathized with Ramona and how she felt.
It made my heart sing as they giggled at her antics.
In reality, my main goal with these books was to have fun discussing them, and we did as they talked about how it felt to be Ramona, what school is like, and arguing with siblings.
All great discussions, and ones you can’t really orchestrate, so I’m not going to give you any great questions this time.
But……
Some specific Ramona book activities
because some of you may be looking for a more specific assignment than a great discussion.
Ramona and Beezus movie night
Snacks are quite light because there’s not a lot of food in Ramona and Beezus, and with Realistic fiction, it’s a little hard to come up with random food to throw in.
So we had:
Baloney sandwiches, which it frequently mentions Ramona eating, especially when at Howie’s house, and she did not like it.
Donuts, which I’m now trying to remember exactly what reason the kids had for them being a snack.
Kitty cat cookies using my favorite sugar cookie recipe, because Ramona always signed her name Ramona Q, but she made the Q look like a kitty cat, which Princess thought was the most awesome thing ever.
All the same, my kids loved the movie, and it is one of their more highly recommended movies, and one of the movies that stuck to the spirit of the book the most.
Future Ticia has a few more ideas just from my memory:
- apple sauce- because they made applesauce after Ramona ate the first bite from several aples
- owls after Ramona made an owl at school and got in trouble for not making it the same as the teacher’s owl
- something related to cow tongue
- gorilla- I don’t know what that would be, but something could be interesting
- bricks- since she and Howie had the brick smashing, it could be several different things
- what else might I add?
More 3rd-grade books made into movies
- Stuart Little book club
- Because of Winn-Dixie book club
- Best Christmas Pageant Ever book club
- Paddington book club
- Charlotte’s Web book club
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