Another Book Club Success – Safe As Houses

In the Spring, we held another book club in an effort to see if we could address some of the learning intentions outlined in the Fall when we read “Freak The Mighty”.  We wanted to:

• Increase our number of participants
• Provide student with the opportunity to read another genre of book (in this case, historical fiction).
• Model for students how we can enjoy and just “talk” about books
• Share in the reading experience with others
• Talk about student connections to the real world (In the story, the characters are faced with a life-threatening situation – we discussed the feeling associated with the characters and link it to times the kids had similar experiences in their own lives (text-to-self-text to world or text-to-text)

• The group of students involved were Grade 6 and 7 students who were part of the first book club and those who became interested or who wanted to try a book club, based in the first experience.   We also targeted our upper intermediate teachers.  No one was turned away.
• Our effort is to make reading more enjoyable, read something from a perhaps, new genre, and put chapter books (rather than graphic novels) in the hands of our students.