Mrs. Gault's Class : Book Clubs On the 4th Grade Hall

CHOICE

When starting book clubs this is the question we pondered on, do we give the students a choice of what to read or just assign books to certain groups? We decided that if we wanted the students to have a love for reading we must first give them the choice of what they want to read, what interests them, what makes them WANT to go home every night and pick up the book to read and then tell
their friends about.
We started out with each teacher picking around 10 books for the class to choose from and then after reading the book jacket for each book the group would decide on which one they wanted to read. We never expected the students to be SO excited about reading a book! Students were also given 5 jobs to pick from in each group that they wanted pursue for a certain time period, everyone worked very well sorting out the jobs and deciding who would be the best at what. When students got their jobs they immediately took action and started doing what they could to make sure they did their best to provide for their group.

These are the different jobs students could choose from:

Stellar Summarizer

Word Wizard

Artful Artist

Literary Luminary

Director

I won't explain the jobs just yet, I will let the students blog about their jobs because they really are important to them and they are doing wonderful taking responsibility for the things their job requires.

Here are the books the students chose and some pictures from our first week doing Book Clubs. Each Friday one student volunteers to bring snacks for his/her group and they have a group discussion on the papers they filled out on their book and what they thought was interesting about the book so far.
At first we were a little worried about discussions going on other than book club discussions but that has definitely not been the case! Students are so engaged and eager to share with their peers and they can't wait to discuss what they have learned or what questions they still have. Stay tuned for the students to blog about their books in the upcoming weeks.