Pop some popcorn for a Stuart Little movie night

As I design my kids assigned reading books for our homeschool reading lessons I usually look at the books I was required to read as a kid.  I’ll throw out any books I found especially horrid (Great Expectations) and add in a few that were my favorites, but weren’t required (Peter Pan).  Stuart Little fell somewhere in the middle.  I remember reading it as a kid and finding the idea of a mouse hilarious, and bonus there is a movie, so it became a book and a movie to read.

Hi! Future Ticia 2023 is updating this post, and since I wrote this all those years ago we have done SO MANY more movie nights.

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Stuart Little

Stuart Little* is a young mouse born to a human family.  Follow his adventures as he learns how to get along as a very small person in a very big world.  Completely unrelated to this very brief plot synopsis of Stuart Little, but this is the same cover of the book I read in 3rd grade.  That makes me happy.

Stuart Little book club

This is one of those parts I’m adding in. At the time our book club was focused on the hands-on Stuart Little book club, but there is a lot to be discussed and done with a more traditional book club that involved talking.

• Hide the Chocolate Stuart Little book club– I love these clubs, we’ve done two of them
• Actually, that’s all I’m going to suggest because that is the best one I found.

Stuart Little book club hands-on assignment

One of the challenges they talk a lot about in the Stuart Little* is adapting the house to his small stature.  While wandering around Pinterest I found the most adorable mouse doll, I made up 3 of them as a surprise for the kids, and then gave them the assignment of creating a house for Stuart Little.  The kids all took to this like ducks to water, and created some great houses for him, complete with playgrounds and furniture.

They also had fun turning their Stuart Little dolls into spies.  It was quite hilarious.

The book Stuart Little also doesn’t particularly have an ending, it’s more of “and here’s where our story ends,” so we did some talking about other adventures Stuart might have had after the book ended as we discussed it all.

Stuart Little movie* snacks

Our snacks were somewhat more exotic this time around.  We had Stuart’s sailboat and his little car.  I made some Stuart mice similar to my Despereaux mice.  Then we made a giant hammer tool for Stuart to use in his various projects.  Since I used cheese for sails I opted not to have some sliced cheese and instead had cheese-its for our final snack.

And while the Stuart Little movie I’m linking to has all 3 movies (I didn’t even know there were 3 movies), we only watched the first movie because that was quite enough, we were rather disappointed when the movie strayed so far from the book with an odd kidnapping and search for parents plot was added.  Of course, I did hear the cry from Princess, “At least it wasn’t Bunnicula,” which years later is still held up as the worst movie ever.

I guess, I should change the title because we didn’t end up popping any popcorn for our Stuart Little movie night.

More 3rd grade books to read and watch

After going through all of the books and a movies we’ve read/watched, most fall into 4th grade, but here are the few I have:

• Ramona book club– who doesn’t love her books, and the movie is just as adorable
• Because of Winn-Dixie book club– one of my favorites, but then I love Kate DiCamillo
• Best Christmas Pageant Ever book club
• Paddington book club

If you want some more ideas, check out my Book and Activity board