The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – A book and a Film

Wizard of Oz

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I have never read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz! Not ever. Not as a child, nor as an adult with young children. Yet, it is such a great book, easy to read and a hundred times better than the film. And we loved the film!

Wizard of Oz Book and a Film

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Book

I bought the Oxford Children’s Classic version because of its appealing cover, and I’m so pleased I did. It is unabridged, with decent sized text. And it contains many extras in the back which help encourage engagement with the text:

Wizard of Oz

The extras include ‘Weird and Wonderful Words’, a vocab section of unusual words and their means and sentences in which they are used. In addition to a lovely brick road road detailing the life of author, L. Frank Baum there is a page about the illustrator, Sam Hadley.

It took me five days to read this book, reading five chapters per day. I read them in the morning, and whilst some are quite long, the girls never complained. It was a lovely, relaxing start to our day.

The Wizard of Oz Film and Snacks

On the Saturday, I planned to have family film night, watching the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and creating lots of fun snacks. Here, Charlotte completely got involved with the shopping and the making of all the snacks. As a result, I was freed up to artify the whole experience 😊

Wizard of Oz

Using some wonderful free art, I decorated everything in sight! From the bottles:

We made emerald city apple juice

To the cup cakes:

These were Emerald City cup cakes with red shoe icing
And these were red shoe cupcakes with Emerald City icing

Lastly, I made some ‘Over the Rainbow’ fruit kebobs:

We’ll make no mention of the fact that the rainbow is not mentioned in the book, only in the film and Dorothy’s shoes were silver and not red in the book

Of course, we chose the 1939 version of the film because, y’know, it is really really good:

A great family night!

This week we are reading The Wind in the Willows.

5 comments

  1. I have seen the movie (almost yearly growing up!), I was Auntie Em in our school production, and yet I have never read the book… sad to say I didn’t even know there was a book!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.