Secrets of Droon - book club

Last week my first through third grade book club read The Hidden Stairs and Magic Carpet by Tony Abbott which is the first in The Secrets of Droon series. My kids are fairly active so here is some of what we did...

Nametags:
As they came in everyone got a nametag with their name written backwards (like the code Princess Keeah uses). After two kids ruined nametags, it was easier for me to write the nametags out.

Quick vote:
Who would go down the stairs? All of my kids decided that they would go down the stairs...

Introduce yourself
We said our names, our ages, and if we had the head of a person and the body of something else (like Max the spider-troll), what would your body be?

Discussion Questions:

1. Would you have gone down the magic stairs?
   
2. What sport do Eric, Julie and Neal play? What sports do you play?
   
3. Eric, Julie and Neal work together as a team? How?
   
4. When do you work with other people as a team?
   
5. Max is a person’s head and the body of what? (Spider). If you could have a person’s head and an animal’s body, what animal would you choose?
   
6. Where would you go and what would you do if you had a magic carpet?
   
7. There was a bird following Keeah, do you think it was a good bird or bad one? Why?
   
8. What did the Red Eye of Dawn disguise as? (A jewel) How would you disguise a magical object?
   
9. How do you think that Eric, Julie and Neal could tell that Keeah was the good guy and the guys on the lizards were the bad ones?
   
10. In this book, they fly on giant flying lizards, what sort of animal would you fly on if you could?
    
11. Why do you think they can’t leave anything behind in Droon? (If they do something from Droon will appear in our world…) How could that be good? How could it be bad?
    
12. How do you think Lord Sparr learned about our world from the soccer ball? What do you think he learned?
    

Activity: Droon Bingo
I used words from Droon (such as groggle, keeah, etc) and made bingo cards. Then we just played regular bingo. Bingo Card Maker

Activity: Droon match/memory
I made two sets of cards up with words from Droon (though not necessarily magic words) such as soccer, stairs, carpet, etc. On one set the word was written forwards, and on the other set they were written backwarsd (like Keeah's code). Both cards had the same clip art on them to be identifiable. The kids played Go Fish with them and also the memory game. (The one where you lay the cards out in a grid and turn over two at a time until you find matches).

Magic Candy Dust
We had some leftover Sandy Candy supplies (test tubes and the candy) from the Harry Potter party so we used that to make our own tubes of "magic dust" (just like Keeah used to heal Eric's ankle).

I didn't do anything specially book related for the snack. Nor did we do a craft since we made the candy tubes.