Girls With Opinions Book Club: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever- Meeting #10

Our fourth meeting of the 2014-15 school year was on The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. It was a great selection for the month of December and a fun read for the girls. This was also nostalgic for some of us who read this as kids. Some of the girls had read other books featuring the awful Herdman children, so they were interested in this book.

The girls snacked on chicken nuggets, fries, cornbread, and fruit while we had our discussion. We used our general discussion questions to help guide the discussion. All the girls were shocked by the Herdmans behavior, most notably burning down the barn with the chemistry set. The lessons in this book are pretty straightforward and the answers to our general questions were pretty obvious (i.e. "Did anyone change in this book?" and "What was the lesson or moral?").

For the craft, we made Christmas ornaments that look like donuts and cupcakes. I used this tutorial from YouTube.

Prior to the meeting, I premade the donut and cupcake ornaments and had them ready for the girls to decorate. I cannot stress how wise this decision was because the foam needs to dry overnight. Presumably you could do the icing and decorations in one step like she does in the video but I WOULD NOT recommend that. The caulk took a long time to dry. Also the foam expanded to make the bottom of the cupcakes round so they wanted to flip over in the muffin tin or resting on a table etc. as the girls were working. I would have had caulk all over the table! The last thing I want to do is have friends with caulk on the interior of their cars, etc. Glitter and glue is way more manageable. Also we used glitter, seed beads, and sequins to decorate rather than real sugar decor since we wanted to be able to store them and not attract critters. I painted a layer of modge podge gloss to the icing so it would look shiny and less like toothpaste too ;) I think it improved the "look." We also hot glued a loop of ribbon to the back after the girls chose their donut and cupcake so it was hang-able.

One could say it relates to the book because the Herdmans wanted to go to church initially because of the free cake, but that's a stretch. Mainly, we wanted to do ornaments for a holiday project ;)

supplies for project

After decoration- they were VERY sparkly in person

As the girls were working on the ornaments, they watched the movie of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It was produced in 1983, is only an hour long, and starts Loretta Swit and a very young Fairuza Balk. Nostalgia! It can be purchased on Amazon here.