Books Clubs...The Anticipation and The Excitement!

So in my last blog I made a resolution to ditch the normal read and answer questions and brought back book clubs. Why I ever left this to begin with, I'm not sure. I have also made a few changes to my old tried and true book clubs and decided to give a little more of the decision making to the students.

I began by giving students a choice of books they could read. I had two separate lists for my two separate blocks based on things I had heard the kids say they wanted to read and based on reading level and based on books I knew I could get at least 4 copies of (one great idea for this by the way is last year Battle of the Books books. If your school participates, they will have multiple copies and these books are always fantastic!)

The two lists can be found below:
Book Club List 1
Book Club List 2

I then told the students they would have 2 days to make their decision because this was something I wanted them to think about. This is when the anticipation began! The students could not wait and asked me every day to add the Google Form to Google Classroom so they could make their selection. So we ended up only waiting one day, and the next day I added the form to classroom for them to make their decision. I still gave everyone until Thursday to make their selection and by Thursday the students couldn't stand to wait any longer to receive their books.....

I made them wait....but only a day. I enjoyed the anticipation and I thought it made the excitement even more great on Friday. Today I gave the students their books, told them their group members name and introduced the nuts and bolts of book clubs.

In the past, I created these wonderful calendars that told the kids what they would read, when they would read it, and what job each person was doing at what time. This year I decided to give that up to the students. I wanted them to have both voice and choice. It was a lot of work to plan everything out for them and I don't think they appreciate being micro managed. So I gave them this sheet instead : Book Club Planning Sheet

I told them their management was up to them. I told them they needed to come up with what was expected and who was doing what job for their first meeting. You would have thought I had passed out a bag of chocolate to each student. They were salivating over the idea of doing things the way they wanted. They were excited, engaged, and wanted to start reading their selected books immediately! (Side note: This class has been extremely difficult to motivate this year, so seeing and hearing the excitement was heart warming!)

We then discussed how they could document each of their meetings. We decided they would complete their jobs in their reading response notebooks, then complete a Google Document describing what they discussed. I told the students this was very similar to our PLC meetings because we have an agenda and we also need to take minutes. For now, their discussion template will look something like this, but I am open to any changes the students have to offer.

I am hoping their excitement will continue as they journey through their first book club.