What's on Your Summer Reading List? Book Clubs!

I may be getting ahead of myself, but there are less than 30 days of school left of the 2013-2014 year, and this weekend weather got me thinking about summer vacation.  I love to read and don't get enough time to indulge myself during the school year so I try to catch up during summer vacation. Often, I am researching books that I want to use with parents or students.

I am about to complete my first virtual parent book club and read the book I am using, Talking Back to Facebook, last summer.  The virtual book club, which I organized through Edmodo, has been a really cool experience.  I wanted to focus on Internet safety and online/social media awareness since I am a co-sponsor of the Cleveland Stars Technology Club at my school---check out our student blog here.  I targeted the parents of my tech club members since their children are clearly interested in online projects and technology and also posted the book club opportunity on my webpage.  We are a small group, but it has been perfect for my first endeavor.

Our first group meeting was in person at my school, and I provided refreshments as a fun kick-off event.  I shared the reading schedule with the ladies, although we got off a little bit with snow days here and there, and discussed what they were most interested in learning about.  Each week I post discussion questions related to the assigned chapters and also present a website resource and/or popular app review to the members.  Everyone posts responses to the questions as they are able during the week so we get a variety of perspectives on the challenges, concerns, and successes of navigating the digital world with children.  I should also mention that the author of this book, James P. Steyer, is the founder of Common Sense Media and his website is a GREAT resource for parents and educators alike as it reviews pretty much every media source you would encounter--apps, websites, movies, tv shows, video games, etc.

Also in book news, I recently finished a fantastic book club with some fifth grade students that was designed to help them learn to cope with anxiety. I mentioned in my post here that I have seen more anxiety in my students this year than I ever have before.  Luckily, Because of Mr. Terupt was on my reading list this past summer so I had the perfect book to use in book club with my students.  I have talked a lot about my book clubs on the Book Club Page of my blog so I won't re-hash how I run everything when you can read about it here. There is also a short summary of Mr. Terupt on that page, which I have now updated since reading the book.  I will say that this book club group was one of my most favorite EVER, and my pre/post data was FANTASTIC.  Every child decreased their self-report Likert scale anxiety rating on my post survey compared to the pre-survey, and EVERY teacher reported seeing less anxiety in their students on the teacher post survey.

I changed things up a little this year and let my students take their books home a couple of times after they asked me to do so....they really wanted to see what happened with the characters!  It did help because the book is 268 pages long, although it reads MUCH faster with lots of short chapters.  It is also an awesome book to use when addressing perspective-taking skills because each chapter is written from the viewpoint of a different character, and they are often describing the same event in multiple ways.

I have been asked several times to create book club materials by school counselors who are interested in running book clubs at their school, and I finally made time to put everything together.  The 25-page Because of Mr. Terupt book club activity pack is now available at my Life on the Fly Store.  I will tell you that it is extremely comprehensive and includes everything you would need to create your student workbooks and get started right away:  a parent permission letter, student pre/post surveys, teacher pre/post surveys and all the other student sheets listed in the user's guide below.

I hope it will be helpful to you and  you will love this book as much as I have! If you are more interested in another book that I have mentioned using in book club, send me an email.  The others will be coming as soon as I can carve out some more time.    Also, I really have started making my summer reading list for the summer.  So far, I am interested in the following books (not all are for books clubs as I use different resources for my lessons, Career Cafe events, etc.):

Happy Counseling and Enjoy! ~ Angela