I waited eagerly for the kids to be old enough and mature enough to read Ender’s Game. This was primarily waiting for Princess to be able to handle some of the topics in the book. She tends to be sensitive with topics like this, and so we waited for this book and a movie combo until 8th grade.
(there are affiliate links in here, shocking I know)
Ender’s Game
The war with the buggers has been going on for a hundred years. Earth desperately needs a general who can win.
“Ender” Wiggins is a third child, that makes him unusual. He’s also small for his age, and brilliant. Will Ender succeed at military school and become the general Earth needs, or will he fail and doom Earth?
Ender’s Game has several sequels that were not part of the original book plan. There is also a companion series following several of the supporting characters from the original book.
Ender’s Game book club snacks
Apparently Ender’s Game is quite popular for a birthday party idea because when I went to look up ideas, I actually found useful snack ideas for our Ender’s Game book club.
I had so many snack ideas for this, I actually didn’t end up making all of the snacks I thought of, so if you’re subscriber, you’ll find this in the book and a movie section under 8th grade, and there are a whole slew of ideas you can pick for your Ender’s Game snacks.
- Bugger Juice- Big Red (oh my goodness the price is so crazy here, you ahve to go see it), my kids love this soda, so it’s always a special treat when we get it
- Army rations- a few months earlier we’d bought a box of MRE‘s, so I pulled out a few for them to share amongst them. You have to understand, a single MRE has like 3000 calories in it, so just that by itself is an insane amount of food
- buggers- gummy bugs
- coccoon- this odd Hershey crumble thing, which was wildly popular
- ration bar- granola bars
- colonists- sour patch kids, my kids favorite snack right now
- battle bread- homemade bread
- Griffin Army/Rat Army/Dragon Army/Salamander Army- I grabbed a giant bag of generic smiley face gummies and sorted them out by color for each army (this appears to be a Wal-Mart thing, since I can’t find a sample link on Amazon)
- meat turnover- croissant dough wrapped around some chopped up lunch meat, always a popular meal at our house
- Earth- sugar cookies with blue die in the dough, and then frosting in green
- Down is the enemy gate- the kids and I never came up with a great plan for this, I think their idea was to make down arrows
- Battle School jello- obviously jello
Of course, having all of that for snacks meant by the end of the night my counter was a huge mess.
Ender’s Game Discussion Questions
I did a lot of looking around and found some interesting Ender’s Game book club questions. I used this Ender’s Game discussion guide choosing one question per chapter for them to answer.
More fun 8th Grade Ideas
Since we read Ender’s Game during 8th grade, here are a few other great 8th grade ideas.
- Ancient Sumeria book list
- Percy Jackson book club (sigh, that movie is so terrible)
- Worldview Unit
- Midsummer Night’s Dream movie night
- 42 Electronics junior high engineering curriculum
Ender’s series is one of A’s favorite books! Her favorite character is Bean, and there is a whole series of sequels featuring him and written much later. She even watched the movie which is rare for her. I thought that the movie simplified the book quite a bit but I enjoyed it nevertheless.
I haven’t read the book (gasp!), but the snacks look fun!
You’d probably enjoy the book. It really has some great stuff to talk through.