Years ago my brother read the Robin Hood Illustrated Classics book and told me all about how Robin Hood actually died. Or how he died in that particular version. See here’s the thing about Robin Hood, he gets reinvented every few generations for the politics of the current generation. Which makes this a perfect Book and a movie because we would have so much to discuss. This could also be a great history lesson. I was absolutely in love with our Robin Hood book club. If you’re curious the particular book we used is on my 7th grade books made into movies list as it has some more complex vocabulary.
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Robin Hood the book
We read the unabridged Howard Pyle Robin Hood. As I was grabbing the affiliate link I was surprised to learn this edition was first written in 1883. This particular version of the story very much focuses on the political differences between the Saxons and the Normans. Which fascinates me. When I get into the book club, that is what we’ll talk about a fair amount, because that is something I hadn’t run into much before.
I mentioned my brother had read the Great Illustrated Classics Robin Hood. This one is an abridged version of Howard Pyle’s text for a roughly 3rd-grade reading level.
There are tons of editions and retellings of Robin Hood. You could make an entire unit out of this. Which gets my brain thinking about that, but focus Ticia, that is not what I’m doing right now.
Robin Hood book club discussion ideas
This is on my short list of ideas to turn into a more extensive book club. But here are a couple of short ideas to get you started for a discussion.
- There is a lot of discussion about the differences between Normans and Saxons. Why are there hard feelings? What are the differences between them?
- Different generations focus on different aspects of Robin Hood’s story. There are several different movies to watch. What aspects of the character do the movies focus on?
- Which characters did you expect to see, and which were new to you?
Robin Hood book club snacks
I believe I have the labels for the snacks uploaded to the subscriber area (I”ll be checking before I send this out to my newsletter), so if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER, you can get the snack labels for free and as part of the welcome sequence you’ll get a coupon to get the books made into movies by grade level bookmarks for free.
I actually have more snacks on my labels than I actually made snacks, which is rather amusing.
- arrows- this would have been pretzel sticks dipped in melted chocolate
- Friar Tuck’s beer- root beer
- king’s deer- sugar cookies using animal cookie cutters
- archery target- sugar and chocolate cookie dough mixed together to create an archry target
- Merry Men- sour patch kids (this was in peak “Mom we should have sour patch kids” time)
- chicken- the Merry Men ate a lot of chicken, so I made some chicken legs
- King Richard- crowns, these were sugar cookies with broken bits of pretzels in them and a Hershey kiss in the middle
- bread- I made some easy french bread
- tax money- Hershey nuggets
- venison jerkey- beef jerky, I might have found some venison jerky at the store
- River- there was a river prominently mentioned in the book, so I also had that for another drink, it was going to be blue gatorade.
As you can see there are several different movies possible to pick from, at the time, Jeff was very excited by the Russel Crowe version, so we watched that one. It had some interesting things to discuss in what it addressed versus what the book we read addressed.
But, let’s look at some different versions you could watch:
- Robin Hood Disney
- Robin Hood Prince of Thieves
- The Adventures of Robin Hood
- Robin Hood 2018– I’m gonna admit I never went to see this one because I found the costumes offensive. Why is Robin Hood in a hoodie for so much of the movie? Why do modern costume designers put their heroes in hoodies? Are modern movie goers that stupid?
More great 7th-grade ideas
- Princess Bride book club
- Coding Resources for Middle School
- How to make a battery
- Bardsy Writing Curriculum Review
- Philippines Unit
Photo by Alireza Sahebi on Unsplash
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