When quarantine hit last year, Andrew Lloyd Webber created a YouTube channel that showed his musicals, bear with me, this will get to the Matilda book club in a minute, and Princess and I eagerly watched the videos each weekend. She endured both the good and the bad of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, though they never did share Starlight Express, much to my chagrin. One of our favorites, I can’t quite decide if it was the favorite, was the 2012 Jesus Christ Superstar with Tim Minchin as Judas Iscariot. She went on to find out he wrote the musical Matilda and started listening to it, and loved it. We hit summertime and the ability to choose the book they chose for book and a movie, and she immediately chose Matilda saying, “Then I’ll know the context for the songs I’m listening to.”
(books made into a movie)
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Matilda follows the trend of most Roald Dahl books of a precocious young child with terrible adults in her life.
Matild has always felt out of place with her family. She loves to read and they love to watch TV. She is sweet and they are bitter. She longs to go to school and learn.
Only to find out school is not the utopia she was hoping for, but as usual in Roald Dahl books, she comes out on top and her horrid family gets their com uppance.
Matilda book club
My discussion with Princess focused on the difference between the book and the music, and how the music had caught the idea of the book.
Oh and how cool Tim Minchin is.
But if you want to actually have a more educational discussion, then check out some of these Matilda book clubs:
Inspiration for Matilda book club
Knowing Matilda is a popular 90s kid movie (that truly was an amazing time for books made more or less faithfully into movies thanks to Nickelodeon studios), I was pretty sure I could find something for Matilda snacks, and I did.
But, only one idea, which surprised me and was a bit sad, but I had something to go from. So let’s get into our Matilda movie night snacks.
Matilda’s family is the stereotypical 1950s family with all of the modern conveniences, which means they ate TV dinners and lots of prepared meals. HOWEVER, we’ve previously read a book with TV dinners and my kids are quite sure they are not as amazing as they sound in books or TV shows. So I was a bit creative with things at times.
- TV Dinners- I found some kind of cookie set, which my kids all declared was absolutely horrendous and how could I get those cookies, so I’m not going to bother looking them up, but they looked like bland TV dinners to me, and like they would taste good. I was wrong
- tea- Matilda enjoys tea with her teacher, so of course we had cucumber sandwiches, which are one of Princess’ favorite snacks, she actually makes it for lunch fairly frequently
- chocolate cake- which I think might have actually been brownies, because I like brownies, not chocolate cake…
- pigtails- because her hair was in pigtails, and so we grabbed some licorice, which looks vaguely like pigtails if you squint and turn your head sideways
- students- the ever-popular Sour Patch Kids
- fried eggs- one of the foods mentioned and our local candy shop has egg gummies, which my kids looked on suspiciously
- eye power- that was the best explanation from Princess, she said things happened when Matilda stared at stuff, so she called it eye power. I really wanted to find eyeball candy, but it seems to only be stocked locally at Halloween, and it was the middle of summer, so instead we grabbed some various candies that were vaguely round eyeball shape, and I’m not really sure what they were
- newts- because something got changed into a newt, or something like that, so I grabbed the alligator gummies from our candy store
- Second hand cars- Her Dad was a used car salesman, and so I grabbed some round cookies to be tires
- Poems- I really should have done the graham cracker and marshmallow fluff idea, but I was feeling lazy and a white cookie with black stripes kind of looks like writing…
- Swamp water- Ginger ale and root beer
More 4th grade activities
While Princess read this book after 9th grade because she was interested in it, the reading level is 4th grade, so I’ll give you a few great 4th grade activities to do.
I know that A enjoyed the book – perhaps we should look up the movie. Too bad we missed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals!