Amie Floersheim's Reviews > Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
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bookshelves: contemporary-realistic-fiction

• Summarize the book
This book is about Greg who is learning to survive middle school. Greg has an older brother Rodrick and a younger brother Manny. His best friend Rowley and Greg go though many adventures together. The book starts by talking about the “Cheese Touch” which gets passed around the school kind of like cooties. Then the book talks about some of the events of the year like Halloween when Greg and Rowley get chased by bullies and end up hiding in Greg’s grandma’s house and when Greg’s mom makes them come home, his dad ends up mistaking them for the bullies and drenches them with water. It also describes how Greg has to learn to wrestle and how that pretty much just humiliates him even more. We then learn about how Greg reacts to his unwanted Christmas presents and how he throws a football at Rowley when he is riding a big wheel and Rowley ends up breaking his hand. The attention that Rowley gets from the broken hand makes Greg jealous. Greg and Rowley are also on the safety patrol which means that they have to walk the kindergarteners home from school. Greg ends up scaring the little kids and Rowley gets blamed for it. When Rowley tells the truth about the situation, he gets promoted and Greg stops talking to him. Greg makes friends with Fregley, a weird kid who eats boogers, and when he is sleeping at Fregley’s house he ends up running home in the middle of the night. Greg and Rowley are at odds through most of the rest of the book especially because Rowley gets voted Class Clown in the yearbook because of a comic strip that Greg helped write. Finally, Greg and Rowley get approached by the bullies that chased them on Halloween and they force Rowley to eat the cheese while Greg gets away by lying. The whole school thinks that Greg touched the cheese but it ends up ok because he is back to being friends with Rowley and Greg makes sure that if Rowley ever brags about being class clown, he will remind Rowley that he knows the truth about what happened to the cheese.
• Identify the characteristics from the text that support the specific genre (What makes it traditional literature? What makes it historical fiction?)
This is contemporary realistic fiction because the themes in this book are based on themes that children of today may face. The characters are based on middle school students and the struggles they may face.
• Identify specific literary or educational concepts that could be integrated into the classroom. (eg. This book is a good text to use when teaching how to make inferences, or This books deals with bullying and would be useful when beginning a discussion about bullying in the classroom.)
This book could be used as a read aloud or as a book club book. There are many different parts of the book that can be discussed such as the character development, the themes, or the way the author uses point-of-view to tell the story from Greg’s perspective.
• Provide any other suggestions that would be useful regarding literary content, reading level, and other ways in which the book might be integrated.
This is just the first book in the series and it could be a good way to get students to continue to want to read more and more because of the connections they can make with the characters. It can give students a lot of satisfaction knowing that they have read several books in the series.
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Reading Progress

Finished Reading
December 14, 2015 – Shelved
December 16, 2015 – Shelved as: contemporary-realistic-fiction

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