“The students are asking me if they’re going to get to do book clubs this year,” Julie told me last week. Her junior English students had participated in a few rounds of book clubs last year and it was encouraging to hear that the learning stuck. 

This was validating because last year, teachers worked hard to create experiences with book clubs that were engaging and meaningful (you can read more about that here or here). We noticed that, as Kate Roberts writes in her book A Novel Approach, “Book clubs, when done well, dance along the line of truly authentic student-driven reading and teacher-directed, curriculum-based literacy.” 

But, the fact remained that organizing book clubs was challenging. For many teachers, it felt like an insurmountable task. Even though we work with amazing librarians (shout out to Amanda and John!), if we wanted to use current, engaging titles, it was difficult to collect enough titles to give students choice and have enough copies for everyone. Teachers were hauling books in their trunk to school, then back to the library. The logistics became something that was holding teachers back from implementing a practice we knew was good for kids.

Teachers Alex White and Kassidy Hammonds spend a few hours on a Friday sorting books for book clubs. Since nobody wants to do that, we had to find a better system.

So, this year, we decided to make book clubs more sustainable using Book Club Kits, an idea I first heard discussed while working with teachers at Anderson High School in Cincinnati, OH. 

What is a Book Club Kit? 

The idea is based off of book club kits at public libraries where librarians put together multiple copies of the same title along with questions and other resources. Put simply, a school Book Club Kit is a collection of multiple copies of multiple titles, along with a possible plan for implementation. 

How do we make a Book Club Kit?

Step one: Collect titles

Hopefully if you’re using book clubs, there’s a culture of literacy in place so students might be able to help identify titles. If that is not yet part of the culture, there are lots of places you might go to look for ideas. You can visit websites like Nerdy Book Club and Pernille Ripp’s blog and the Disrupt Texts site and hashtag. NoveList Plus, a resource we can access through our public library, also has excellent recommendations. Additionally, there are lots of threads on Twitter where teachers and students share titles.

Identify what students might like. Conduct a survey. Do an inventory of your book room to see what you already have. Ask students for their recommendations. Scour the library. Talk to kids. 

Once we did this, I compiled titles into a document and sent to teachers for feedback. From there we were able to use department funds to purchase enough books for six kits (each kit has enough books for a class set). If you don’t have funds available, you might consider Donors Choose, or participate in the #clearthelist social media campaign.

It was also important that the titles could, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop outlines in her scholarly work, act as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for readers. Therefore, we were intentional about having a wide representation in both content and authors (to read more, read Amy’s post here).

Step Two: Cluster the texts

We didn’t want these books to just sit on shelves to be put into hodge-podge book club configurations. Instead, we decided to be intentional about the way we clustered the titles. For example, in freshman ELA, one of the kits is centered around the theme Coming of Age; 10th graders might participate in a book club around novels in verse, or maybe a genre study of mystery titles. In 11th grade, there’s a kit around memoir. A book club around literary non-fiction for 12th graders contains the most complex titles. You might think about these groupings in three main ways: 

• Genre (novels in verse, mystery, literary non-fiction, etc)
• Theme (coming of age, overcoming obstacles, etc.)
• Author Study (Jason Reynolds, Nikki Grimes, K.A. Holt, Kwame Alexander, Sharon Draper are examples of authors whose writing is varied enough and would make great book club possibilities)

Step Three: 

Make it accessible. We put all the books in clear plastic bins. There’s a sign-out sheet to keep track of the kits. Each kit has a list of the titles and how many copies, along with a QR codes that link to a corresponding unit plan one might use with that set of titles. 

I finished organizing the kits last week and already two of them are out in classrooms. We’re getting ready to launch the Mystery Book Clubs once we get back from Thanksgiving and I’m excited to see the way a genre study will play out. 

Now that you have your Book Club Kits organized, I strongly encourage you to check out the book Breathing New Life Into Book Clubs by Sonja Cherry-Paul and Dana Johanssen (and if you use the code NCTE19 you get 30% off and free shipping!).

Angela Faulhaber works as a literacy coach in Cincinnati, OH, where she gets to work with the best book nerds in all the land. She just finished reading Beartown by Frederick Backman and is in that sad phase of book-mourning where the next book can never live up. She welcomes your suggestions.