Your First Book Club
Meeting
Today's
Snack: Cookies,
cupcakes and cut-up fruit set up as a buffet makes a nice ice-breaker for a
first-time book club meeting. Lemonade is always a surprise for a beverage,
too.
--------------------
Today's Supplies:
Help from a parent,
librarian or teacher
Materials to make
invitations
A list of books you'd
like to read
Talk to your parents, a school
librarian, your teacher, a local bookstore employee, and others about ways to
obtain a quantity of the same book for a reasonable price.
If your school participates in a regular book
catalog, you might set up your meeting when the catalog comes out, so that
everybody can order the same book through that service, often at a very
inexpensive rate.
Or, if you can arrange for laptop
service at your meeting place, you can check the used books section of an
online bookstore to see how much or how little books that you might want are
available, and if there are enough copies for sale for everyone in your group
to be able to get one at a reduced rate.
All set? To get the ball rolling, make
colorful, fun invitations that tell:
·
the time, date and place of your first meeting
·
how long it's going to last (one hour?)
·
how often you're going to meet (once a month?)
·
what you're going to do (all club members will read the same book that
month and come to the club meeting to briefly discuss the book and then do a
related activity for a few minutes)
·
and advertise the fact that you're going to have refreshments
(yessssss! This will bring people out to your meeting more than anything
else!).
Mail or give to the kids you'd like to join
your club. Remember, if you're not inviting the whole class, you shouldn't hand
out invitations at school. Send them through the mail, so that you don't hurt
kids' feelings who aren't being invited.
Ask participants to come to the meeting with
ideas for books that the club might want to read. You might want to select
three books for the next three months so that everybody has to go to the
bookstore to buy a copy, or can order it online, and be ready for three months
in advance.
Since most books are available in paperback and
inexpensively as used books sold over the Internet, a book club shouldn't be
too expensive for anybody. You can also sell your books to another group of
kids or pass them down to your younger brothers and sisters.
It would be smart to check with the teachers at
your grade level to see what books are going to be taught that year and the
next year in class. That way, you won't be duplicating. There are so many good
books out there, it would be a shame to double up on a book selected for both
your club and the classroom!
You can make a master list of books that
members recommend and then vote, so that the most popular ones are the ones selected
for your club. Or each member can recommend one book, and be in charge of
leading the discussion that month.
Here's how you could organize this:
- Invite kids to an
organizational meeting and bring snacks, such as today's ideas, described
at the top.
- Provide an
"icebreaker" or introductory activity, such as going around the room and
have everybody tell what their favorite book is so far.
- Get their contact
information - phone number, mailing address, email address, and find out
how they want to be reminded of upcoming meetings.
- Set the times and
dates for the meetings for the first three months.
- Does everybody want to
read fiction, or do some people want to mix it up with other genres, such
as biography or poetry?
- Choose a name for your
book club.
- Decide what the first
book will be and give everybody enough time to get a copy and read it
before the next meeting.
- Get volunteers to
bring snacks related to the theme of that month's book, and
remind them a few days in advance.
- Appoint a
"meeting chairman" to bring in discussion questions and an activity each
month related to that book. You can all chip in to meet expenses if needed.
