Student Book Clubs in your School Library
Student book clubs can be both easy AND impactful–I’ll show you how in this blog post! To be honest, it took me a while to get started with student book clubs because I thought they had to be complicated. I thought that I had to assign different group roles (like facilitator and vocabulary inspector) and require students to read a certain amount in between book club sessions and stay even longer after school. Nope!
Can we assume that classroom teachers are reading whole books aloud with their students? Can we assume that all families are encouraging reading at home? I think it’s up to us as school librarians to personally make sure that every student at our school hears at least one whole chapter book read aloud to them before they leave our campus.
Student Book Clubs at Lunch
I found that it was easiest to schedule student book clubs during their assigned lunch time. With a “lunch bunch” book club, students didn’t miss any instruction in the classroom, and no one missed the book club because of an intervention that pulled them out of the classroom. And students LOVE the special treat of getting to eat lunch in the library!
At the start of lunch time, I walked the students from the cafeteria to the library, giving explicit instructions to “walk slowly and hold your tray with both hands.” Near the end of their lunch time, I walked the students back to the cafeteria, with the same instructions. I stayed in the cafeteria until the students were either lined up with their classroom teacher or seated at their assigned table (if the teacher wasn’t there yet).
Ebooks & Audiobooks for Student Book Clubs
For our weekly book club meetings, I would project the ebook on the screen (using my laptop) and play the audiobook (using my phone and a speaker). This allowed all students to see and hear the words at the same time, which helped our struggling readers and English language learners. It also introduced students to forms of reading they might not have tried yet.
I chose to use audiobooks because the professional narrators provide a great listening experience. It also allowed me to step away for a moment if someone stopped by the library needing help. I would appoint a student to click the page turns on the laptop, and the audiobook narration would continue while I wrote down a teacher request or took payment for an overdue book.
How did I get all of these ebooks and audiobooks? I used our district’s Overdrive subscription, our public library’s Overdrive subscription, and (as a last resort) my own Kindle and Audible accounts. You could definitely make this happen with a print book and your own voice, and just show the print book under the document camera to project on the big screen.
Scheduling Student Book Clubs
I started student book clubs with the third grade classes, because there is significant research stating that third grade is the point where “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” In other words, students with strong reading skills continue to excel while struggling readers fall further behind. At this point, if students aren’t proficient readers they are many times more likely to become high school dropouts.
We had 6 third grade classes at the time that I started this initiative, so I hosted book club once a week (on 2 different days) for 2 classes in September and October, 2 classes in November, December and part of January (due to school breaks), and the last 2 classes in late January through mid-March. This allowed us to finish up all of the third grade book clubs before testing season started in April.
The following year, I expanded the book clubs to fourth and fifth grades, so that I had a “lunch bunch” book club meeting four out of five days in every week. These book clubs were made possible by my school district’s commitment to flexible scheduling in the library, which allowed me to block out this time in my day and not have classes checking out books during the book club lunches.
No talking during student book clubs
Because students had only 30 minutes for lunch, we did not take time for discussions during book club. It took 5 minutes to walk from the cafeteria to the library and get seated, and 5 minutes to walk back to the cafeteria. Occasionally, if a chapter ended shortly before our departure time, I would ask a general discussion question before we lined up at the library door.
I did not allow students to talk during the audiobook narration. At the outset, I explained how other students couldn’t hear the book over their conversations, and that would be unkind. I stated that they could talk during lunch the other four days of the week and at recess right after lunch.
Sometimes families joined us for book club if they were planning to join their student for lunch that day. They sat at their own table and enjoyed the book with us, or I gave them the option to go back to the cafeteria if they wanted to be able to chat during lunch.
This “no talking” rule might sound harsh, but I chose to protect our 20 minutes of reading time because I knew how important it was in our students’ lives.
No homework for student book clubs
We read the whole book during book club, from beginning to end. No one ever had homework for our student book clubs. I did not want their enjoyment of the book to depend on a family reading time that might not exist.
To figure out how long it would take to read (listen to) the whole book together, I would look up the audiobook on Amazon to see how long it was, then divide that length into 20 minute sessions. For example, a Judy Moody audiobook is a little over an hour, so we can finish the book in 3 or 4 book club meetings and then students can check out more books in the series from our school library. Wish, by Barbara O’Connor is 4 hours and 41 minutes, so it will take 14 weeks to read together.
Were student book clubs extra work?
I did get more steps in, walking back and forth to the cafeteria. I did have to take a couple of minutes to wipe down the tables with disinfectant spray (aff link) before the next class came in, even though students picked up their own trash. It did take a few minutes at the beginning of the school year to choose the book for each grade level, locate the ebook and audiobook and to email the teachers with the schedule.
But the results were SO worth it! Student book clubs became the highlight of my days! Don’t we all wish that we could spend more time enjoying good books with our students, watching their eyes light up as the pages turn, instead of dealing with all of those “extra” tasks that our jobs entail?
After seeing how easy it was, some classroom teachers and specialists on our campus started their own “lunch bunch” book clubs, even giving up their “duty-free lunch” times to do so. This is one of the ways that you promote a culture of reading on your campus. You need to show the importance of reading whole books from beginning to end, rather than test prep passages and packets.
Questions about Student Book Clubs?
If you’ve got questions about how you can make student book clubs work for you, please ask in our Learning Librarians Facebook group. I’d love to help you make this happen for your students!