Starting a primary school book club can seem daunting. How do you choose a book, keep children interested, and demonstrate impact?
In this blog, we discuss why having a book club is a great idea and share some ideas that are both practical and engaging.
Book clubs can create communities of readers, encouraging lively informal book chat and debate. Outside of the classroom environment children can enjoy reading that is not directly connected to the curriculum and can be exposed to a wider range of authors and genres than they might otherwise come across.
Reading helps children acquire a valuable set of skills, such as listening, being creative, extending their vocabulary and learning about the history and cultural heritage of their own and other countries helping them to access the whole curriculum. Children that read for pleasure generally have better educational outcomes than those that don’t and a regular reading habit encouraged by a book club will be reflected in the classroom.
As well as academic skills, pupils also learn about developing and expressing their preferences, enabling them to make informed choices. The joy of a well-run book club is that these added social and academic benefits are the organic result of reading when it is done for pleasure.
The key to success is to know your audience and what you want to achieve from the club. Who is the club for? Is it for a specific age group or key stage? Are you trying to target enthusiastic readers, or engage reluctant readers? Is it part of an intervention strategy to improve academic performance? Are you trying to support a broader and more balanced curriculum through different book genres and topics?
When you decide on the focus of the book club it will help structure your club and focus on the outcomes.
Involving pupils in the planning and running of the sessions will make them feel like they own the group. It’s a chance for them to suggest titles and for it to feel different from being in the classroom and reading a prescribed text. Find out if your target group has any common interests and then identify reading materials, games, and puzzles to stimulate these interests. Regularly collaborating on ideas will also help to make the book club feel fresh and interesting, helping to keep your readers coming back.
When setting up and running your book club you need to consider a few practical details to make it as successful as possible.
You will need to give everyone enough time to read the book, so once a fortnight or once a month may be frequent enough. Keep the meetings regular and schedule dates in your diary. You want to keep your group interested and wanting to come back, so try not to cancel or change meetings at the last minute.
Holding meetings in a relaxed environment away from a classroom setting is important. If you have a library this might be the obvious place. Or, for a fun meeting in the summer, what about a pop-up tent? The lure of food and refreshments is also an important element of any book club! Books, biscuits and hot chocolate are hard to beat.
Demonstrating impact can help secure time, space and a budget for your book club. Use or adapt the Children’s Reading Surveys created by the Open University to generate ‘before’ and ‘after ‘data. Make sure you take photographs and document your book club activities.
Research tells us that learner-led book selection is important so give your book club members a choice. You could give them a collection of books from which they make the final selection based on covers and blurbs. Try Booktrust recommendations for inspiration. Or turn the process of choosing into a fun book club session:
And finally, try reading the book aloud chapter by chapter making the most of cliff-hangar chapter endings. Use character voices and intonation, modelling storytelling so that pupils can read aloud to younger pupils, spreading the benefits of your book club throughout the school.