Bear with me, this post is coming over a year after I did this program.

I Survived the Destruction of Pompeii, AD 79 was our January 2020 book of the month. For this book club meeting, we had fruit - apples and grapes. I always try to pull a snack inspired by the text and apples were specifically mentioned as being sold in the market. 

Our meetings always follow the same general outline: Snacks and discussion then activity/craft.

My craft for this meeting was a little time sensitive so I wrote out an itinerary for the hour. You can guess how that went... 😬 because the craft I went with might have been a little much. 

Mosaic Tiles

The pros: Super pretty!!

The cons: For this craft, our first step was gluing the stones onto our base and letting it dry. 

We took the first 10 minutes of book club doing this. 

However, the problem started when we had TWO new families come in late, after the group had already glued the stones down and while we were talking about the book/ snacking. I had no volunteers and it might have been easier to manage if I did have help. But those two instances threw this off a tad.

Also, the craft always ends up being 10 times messier than when I do my trial run of a craft. 

The general idea...
Supplies:

• Mosaic Tile Adhesive
• Wood Base ( This is what I used )
• Premixed Tile Grout
• Sponges
• Pretty Stones
• Spatula tool thing
  
• Bowls with water 

optional: Q-tips to spread the glue

optional: I knew they wouldn't be dry by the end of book club, so I made cardboard carrying cases for them. 

First Step

Glue stones to base. Let dry. 

Second Step

Once stones have dried to base, you're ready to grout! 

Use the spatula tool thing and spread out the grout around the stones.

Third Step

Using a sponge and water, gently wash away excess grout.

After that, let it dry! 

Ok, obviously, that is the most basic general idea. But that's the gist. 

If I were to do this book club meeting over again, I would choose a less complex craft. 

Something like, the sticker mosaic crafts from Oriental Trading or coloring mosaic style patterns on white ceramic tiles. 

Of course, you can always do something with the volcano - to be honest, I forgot why I was so focused on doing mosaics for this.

Click here for my chapter by chapter breakdown of the book. 

I won't lie. There's a reason I put-off reading books about wars in book club and that's because they intimidate me. World War 2 has so much content to unpack, where do you even begin?!

 Because this book was very dark compared to others written by Tarshis, I really struggled to find appropriate, respectable activities/games/crafts. Eventually I was able to bring everything together by focusing on the Jews, since the book opens in a Jewish ghetto.

Snack
As always, I like to pull a snack item from the text. The book mentions several different items: potato

These rolls came from Wal*Mart bakery and were ah-mazing!!

soup, raspberries, bread, cheese, apples, frothy milk and water.

Since we had fruit last month for Pompeii, I decided on potato soup and bread. After hitting a few dead ends looking for restaurants that serve potato soup, we settled on mashed potatoes instead.

Mashed potatoes were made in the crock pot 4 hours beforehand and served with rolls, butter, cheese and glasses of milk.

We also had tiny Torah's that were Smartie candy, taped and covered to look like the scrolls. Click here for my printable Torah template. ↙↙↙

Discussion
We had quite a large group this time. Every meeting we go around the room and share our favorite and least favorite parts of the book. If there are other aspects that the group wants to discuss, we can also chase those rabbits. Our discussion time was limited this month because of our size and in order to have time for both our activity and craft.

Since I'd made tiny Torah's to eat, we also briefly talked about the Torah. In the book, Nazi soldiers show up in Esties, Poland (where Max and his sister Zena live) and set fire to the synagogue, destroy Torah scrolls and move the Jews into the ghetto.

In full disclosure, one thing that detracted from our discussion was having snacks during it, coupled with our number. Consistently, we have around 10-13 kids at I Survived Book Club. The last few months we've nearly doubled!!

Activity
(This was a last minute addition since I was afraid our craft wouldn't take very long.)

For our activity, we played a sequencing game using events from the book. I don't have a picture of the game in-play, but if you look at the cover picture for this post, you'll see 4 sets of colored cards.

Kids were divided into 4 teams and each given a set of 17 cards to put in chronological order. They had 10-15 minutes to do so. We went over the answers together.

Click here for printable PDF game cards and answer sheet

Craft
Finding a respectful craft took some digging. Typically, I can pull elements from the book and find a way to make them into a game or craft but as I said before, this book is so much darker than her others.

The bulk of Jewish crafts on Pinterest are centered around the holidays, but JLF Studio had an adorable folding Star of David card, which incorporated well into our discussion and theme.

It involves cutting, folding and decorating. In preparation, I designed both a star template, which was printed off on card stock paper and an insert with a quote from the book about the robin bird.

(In the book, Zena spots a robin which is a sign of good luck, perched on the fence surrounding the ghetto. Just past this fence is a berry bush. Max is able to crawl under it to collect the berries. The bird is mentioned in one other part of the story.)

To decorate our stars once they were all put together we had markers, stickers and little robin birds to cut out.

Click here for printable Star of David template 

Click here for Star of David inserts



And that was all I had for this one! It's not one for the books, but hopefully you can take something away from this. Feel free to use any of my PDF's

And that's basically the gist of it! I'm a little distracted typing this up so I probably shouldn't publish this. ... I'll make a note to re-read this later.

 I feel like it's becoming a habit that I accidentally give away all my copies of a book we're reading and then end up walking into book club never having gotten my hands on another copy!

For discussion, activity/craft and snack ideas, I rely heavily on the book for guidance and inspiration. But with these grizzlies, I was flying blind.

One thing that I tell the kids who come up to the desk and ask about our book club is that if you can't get the book to read in time, just read about the event! You'll still have something to share in our discussion and you will still have an idea of the what the book will be based on.

This book however, apparently didn't have much to do with the two girls who were attacked and killed on the night of August 12, 1967.

DISCUSSION
After the group shared their favorite/ least favorite parts from the story, I shared the actual events of that night. Boy was I glad I'd printed off my notes!!

What struck me about this story is the coincidences and chance that came into play that night... In 57 years of Glacier Park history, there had been virtually no issues with bear attacks.

One of my favorite quotes in my research was a from a park ranger stating that, "If you set up a danger index ranging from zero to ten, where the butterfly is zero and the rattlesnake is ten, the grizzlies of Glacier Park would have to rate somewhere between zero and one."

Like I Survived The Shark Attack of  1916, this book does have specific, real-life individuals who were killed.

I printed off their pictures to pass around and we talked briefly about each girl: Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons.



Other discussion topics included... 

• How Glacier National Park desensitized interaction between bears and humans
• How parks have changed to become safer for visitors and wildlife
• Bear facts including food, size and habits
• Interacting with wildlife and what to do in a bear attack

SNACKS
Providing the snack that's mentioned in the book is one of my favorite elements of book club! I feel like it helps bring the to life and the kids have caught on to it, so when I didn't have Bugles, they questioned me.

(Bugles are apparently in the book)

As seen in the main picture, we had Teddy Grahams and berry Fruit Snacks. These were wrapped in pictures of Grizzly Bears.

Another idea was gummy bears.


ACTIVITY
There were a few ideas I was playing around with to tie-in with the 1967 event...

• Picking up trash around the library (since that's what was attracting the bears to campsites and such)
• A bear hunt (Park Rangers went out hunting the bears after the attacks) 
• Bear craft (Pinterest is riddled with adorable crafts)
• Some kind of edible bear snack. One thing in particular that I would love to do (but could never get permission for) is making smores with a candle flame. My mom and I used to do this all the time at home, growing up.

What we ended up doing was a relay race to collect food for bears. Participants were divided into teams and given "bear claws" to collect their food and carry back to their "den"

This relay game will get its own post, so sit tight while I get that situated! It'll be up in the next few weeks.

Another short and sweet craft/activity write-up today. For this months I Survived Book Club meeting, my coworker stepped in for me and led the discussion. However, I really wanted to share this cup racing game with you.

This was inspired by An Almost Unschooling Mom's blog post, which can be found here!

In this book, Paul Colbert is an 11 year old boy living in occupied France. One day, a carrier pigeon finds him crying on the road and leads him away into a clearing, where an Allied soldier, Victor Lopez, is trapped in a tree. Paul cuts Victor free of the tree and when Nazi soldiers and a dog come along, they hide together. Victor is wounded though and the dog, who can smell his blood, charges their hiding place. The carrier pigeon bravely distracts the dog by attacking it and forcing the dog to run off with the officers following it. The pigeon plays another role further along in the story, but I won't give it all away.

Because the carrier pigeon was such a fun character, when it came to finding a craft or activity for this book, this idea just clicked.

For this game, players created their own carrier pigeons with plastic cups. These were threaded  through a string, extended the length of the room and players could race them by blowing into the cup, making them fly.

 HOW TO:
This is super simple. As previously stated, I wasn't able to host book club, but my coworker said this activity went over very well.

1. Using a small plastic or paper cup, chisel a hole in the bottom for the yarn to be threaded through.

2. Print out wings and head to color and then cut out. Here's my PDF! (Bear in mind, I'm no professional. These were hand drawn, scanned and cleaned up in MS Office.... So no judgements.)

3. Tape wings and head to cup. Your bird will also need a secret message to help balance it out when it's suspended on the sting, so it doesn't flip upside down.

4. Thread a piece of yarn through it, running the length of the room.

5. Blow in the cup to make it move and race against other birds.

 First person to the other side of the room is the winner!

One thing that my coworker did say, is that she gave them the option to race their birds here or take them home to fly. If the kids wanted to take them home, she sent them home with a strand of yarn. Several raced their carrier pigeons at the library though.

And that's it!
Feel free to use my PDF for whatever you need and GOOD LUCK with your cup racing! If you try this idea out, let me know how it went 😀

 

Sometimes book dialogue comes naturally to the group and other times it doesn't. To help initiate and progress conversations, each meeting begins with discussing our favorite parts of the story. If every kid shares a scene from the book then right off the bat everyone is interacting and contributing to book club!

One of my favorite bits from I Survived The Shark Attacks of 1916 was about Hermann Oelrich, the rich shipping owner who is mentioned by Uncle Jerry. In this story, while out on a yacht with friends, Hermann jumps into shark infested waters and swam around to prove a point that sharks wouldn't attack a human. He yelled, splashed and caused a huge commotion in the water to attract the sharks but ultimately just scared them away. He offered a $500 ($12,000 in today's money) to anyone who could give a proven example of a shark attack on the Eastern Coast.

The group was very excited to hear that this was a true story and jump started our conversation to other topic points.

Of the 5 victims (Charles Vansant, Charles Buder, Lester Stilwell, Stanley Fisher and Joseph Dunn), I was only able to find 3 pictures. These were printed off and used in our discussion to help connect the story to real faces. Most of our discussion was talking about each attack individually.

This game was inspired by Battleship.The objective of this game to blast (remove) your opponents sharks out of the water (table) first. First team to do this, wins. This is accomplished by tossing in dynamite (red bean-bags) into the water towards your opponents sharks.
Set up: 
1.Taped off grid on a spare table with painters tape.

•  This included 4 squares that were marked off separately with tape.

2. Made 10 bean bag sharks in 2 different colors (5 of each).

• These were made with felt and rice. Edges were hand sewn together.

3. Covered small pieces of cardboard with painters tape and attached to table.

• >These blockers just make the game a little harder 😄

Game Play:    

• Divide into 2 teams and place sharks strategically on the board

• One player at a time, use the bean bags (our were hearts and angry birds from another program), knock your opponents shark out of the water.
• First team to clear the board of the opposing sharks wins.

Special Squares:
The 4 squares marked off separately with tape cannot be used to place sharks in when setting the board.

If a shark is knocked into this square by a team member, the opposing team is given the opportunity to resurrect one of their own sharks, moving one shark from the floor to back into gameplay.

Review:
This game was so much fun! In 1916, after Joseph Dunn was nearly killed by the shark, Matawan Creek was dynamited. The story for this game to pretend like the red bean bags were dynamite and blow the opposing teams sharks out of the water.
The group went through the game several times before deciding that they wanted to play tournament style, which we did!

The cardboard blockers lasted until about the third game but they provided the perfect challenge to make this game great.

One bin I even bought for myself to use at the library and then take home - these bins are nice for putting fabric in! 

Set Up: The video does a very good job of going through how to set up this plastic bin for your tsunami. We did have a couple minor changes to ours. These changes were things such as, instead of using blocks of wood and gluing the plywood to the blocks to make our platform for the beach, we just set our platform on top on small plastic boxes filled with rocks - our blocks off wood kept floating up.

One thing I wasn't too fond of concerning ours was that our bins seemed to be just a little too short to get a good wave in.

For the activity itself, kids were split up into groups of 3 or 4 and given 10-15 minutes to build a Lego City to destroy. Once all the cities had been built we added water and made tsunami's using the plywood and string to create the wave.

Unfortunately, the Lego's we used must have been too strong because none of our cities were too badly damaged by the storm. 😝  Finding an alternative to use other than Lego's might be something to consider if you're wanting your city to fall. But how was I to know it wouldn't work?!

Overall, fun book, interesting discussion, Lego activity and unique snacks. Two thumbs up! 👍👍

Forgot to Mention....

World's worst picture, I know.. 

To help visualize how tall the waves were compared to us, we had this little activity. The writing on the board say, "On some parts of the Japanese coast, the waves reached 100 feet high! That's nearly 25  time taller than you." 

The question posed to the group was, how tall would the wave have been compared to the Lego Mini figure .... see him down at the bottom? 

We took turns making marks on the board where we thought the top of the wave would be. Several of the kids thought that the wave would have actually been taller than what the dry erase board was, so they got stickers to stick on the wall. The star is how tall the wave would have actually been compared to the Lego Man.