Sharing some resources for Book Clubs

[Erin Quinn]

Hi everyone,  

 

I posted this to the Middle School group a few days ago, but thought I'd post it here too. I started book clubs with my grade 7s this week. One of the concepts of 21st Century Learning is that learning should be as real-world connected as possible. Book Clubs, rather than Lit Circles, are something that many adults participate in. They often have food and decorations that reflect the theme of the book they are discussing. So I took that and ran with it.

 

At our school, we integrate a curriculum called Career and Technology Foundations into our core courses. This takes the place of many regular options/complementary courses such as woodshop, foods, and computer courses and integrates that into the projects kids are doing in their classes. That's why there's a focus on these sorts of things in the choices that kids get to include at their party (we are also fortunate to have a 3D printer, where kids can design things in Google SketchUp and it prints it in 3D in polymer!!! So cool!!!)  

 

I started the book clubs this week and so far they are going really well. I had the kids figure out how much they wanted to read each week and set those deadlines for themselves. They also had their first discussion, which went really well. They are using the Discussion Moves from Ryan's cover on his Playlist to help with this, but we've also been doing letter-essays a-la Nancie Atwell since the beginning of the year so they are used to giving their opinions and backing them up with information from the text.

 

The books I've chosen are:

- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

- The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

- A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

- Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

- Can You Spell Revolution by Matt Beam

- The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

 

So far all the kids are LOVING their books. So yay!!!!!

 

I'm including a Publisher document which you can take and redo and remix, a PDF version, and a copy of the self evaluation I'm having my kids do at the end of each discussion.