Low Prep Beginner Books Clubs
Looking for a new way to ignite your students’ enthusiasm for reading? Try launching a ‘Book of the Week’ to build suspense and excitement centered around good books!
Launching book clubs can be a daunting task for teachers. They often require significant prep work and scaffolding, which can make book clubs time consuming and tricky to facilitate. If you’re looking to get kids talking about books (without all the hassle), give this idea a try!
Every Monday, select a new ‘Book of the Week’ to introduce. Use this opportunity to show your students a wide-range of authors, genres, styles and themes.
Hook potential readers by
- Delivering a teacher-led book talk to get them interested
- Showing a ‘Meet the Author’ video on Youtube to spotlight new authors
- Encouraging students to make recommendations or contribute to the Book of the Week
Create a think space for students to publicly interact with the book by
- Creating an interactive display where you pose one or two questions for the kids to think and/or write about
- Having your kids create a blog post to share their ideas about the book
- Allowing participating readers to hold self-directed book clubs to talk about the book
Guide Self-Directed Book Club Conversations by
- Providing sentence stems to help kids articulate their ideas
- “I would rate this book ___ stars because…”
- “I was surprised when…”
- “I find this author to be…”
- Providing a small bank of questions for the kids to choose from
- What was your initial reaction to the book?
- What were some strong themes coming out of the book?
- How did the characters change throughout the book?
- How did your thinking change as you read?
Great books to get your started might be
If you’ve discovered new ways to get kids talking about books, let us know by commenting below! As like-minded educators, we’d love to hear from you x
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