Book Club Plus Chap. 6-8

Consider the ideas discussed in Book Club Plus! about talk in the classroom and managing book club. How do these ideas compare with what you are seeing in your own classroom regarding classroom talk and managing your literacy program? If you were going to try out some aspects of book club, what types of support would you need to provide?

One thing that my mentor teacher really tries to do in my classroom is make books that our students will be interested in available for them. He continues to add to his classroom library even though he already has more books than the shelves can hold. The read aloud books that he chooses to read so far have involved main characters around the age of the students in class. This really seems to keep most of the class interested. There have been several students change books during independent reading because they were not interested after reading some of it. We do allow them to change and I think it is important for students to have the ability to choose what they want to read.

I know that we have book club books and I am still waiting for them to be used for book club and not just any other book in the class library. There are book club books at many different reading levels so that there can be groups for book club at different reading levels.

To try out book club in my classroom I would need to start out with a simple task and establish a routine. We have worked most of this first month of school setting up our classroom routines. Now that we have these established most of the students are able to transition with a simple instruction. I would want to make sure I had a basic routine down for my classroom of how book club was going to look in our classroom and how I expected them to behave and interact. Having the aide and my mentor teacher in my classroom I could have help keeping the groups on task. This would make managing a book club easier in the beginning stages. I would also need to know the reading levels of my students to be able to make book club groups of similar reading level.