Some call them literature circles, but I’ve always found that name a little on the snooty side.  Book clubs are a staple of Readers Workshop for many a kick-butt reading teacher, including myself.  But saying “I do book clubs” doesn’t say much about what is really happening–or why.  Over the past several years I’ve run book clubs in many different ways, trying out one framework after another, never completely satisfied.  In general, there are two strains of book club–one that assigns certain roles for students to perform (sometimes with catchy names like “Literary Luminary” and such) and another strain that is fairly unstructured (more like the book clubs us grown-ups might belong to).

Which is better?  Neither.  Both.  Um… what was the question?  For the past couple of years, I’ve done a few book clubs per year, and I tend to do one that has assigned roles, one that is kind of free-form, and the third ends up taking the shape of whichever of the first two was most successful with that particular group of kids.  I personally prefer the book club format that allows all the readers to come to the table with their own ideas and questions and conversations take shape from there, which works really well with motivated, focused readers.  Not so much with the reluctant, “focus-free” crowd.  I just completed this year’s first book club experiences with my current class, and found that the less-structured format only worked for about a third of them.  I’m thinking that our next book clubs will be more structured for the two-thirds who seem to need that, and the ones who don’t may continue to construct their own book club conversations and experiences.  We’ll see how that goes.

Another issue is choice in book clubs–realistically, I have what I have in terms of small sets of books, and we have to choose from what is available.  That said, do I just let students pick whatever looks good to them?  Do I strictly enforce matching book levels and student reading levels?  Do I assign students to clubs?  No.  Yes.  Um…insert awkward pause here.  I’ve done all of these things at one time or another.  In Happy Happy Perfect Land, students would have the metacognition to choose the best book club selections on their own every time and growth would ensue.  Some students really can, because they have clear identities as readers, while others are still experimenting and struggling to understand where they are at as readers.  So I tend to offer up choices for book club, ask students to give me their top three picks and the name of the title they really don’t want to read, and then I sit with that information and try to make everyone at least a little bit happy while I consider group dynamics that will either aid or hinder book clubbing.  Sometimes I even get it right!

If you’ve ever been part of a really good book club, you know why I “do” book clubs in my fifth grade classroom.  Reading a book that makes you think and feel and wonder and open up to new ideas is pretty cool.  Getting to share that journey with others is freaking awesome.  Conversations that challenge my thinking about a book, that explain pieces I have missed, that reveal not only new aspects of the book to me, but new aspects of the people I am sharing the book with–oh, man.  That’s the journey I want my young readers to take in book club, in whatever way they are ready to do so.

In between book club experiences, I now have a tub of books for “dynamic duos”–pairs of students who want to read the same book and form their own mini-club.  At the end of our recent foray into clubs, I was not convinced that many of my boys were all that interested in book club experiences (I believe I used the word “focus-free” earlier).  But within a few days, I had requests from several students, including some of those boys, to try a “dynamic duo” book with a classmate.  I’m hopeful.

13 Treasures

Author:  Michelle Harrison

One of my voracious readers loaned me her copy of this book.  There was a definite YOUHAVETOREADTHIS vibe about her, and after a couple of promptings, I finally sat down to 13 Treasures.  I’ll be honest–the cover has a “Do you believe in fairies?” blurb and I was not up for a saccharine fantasy of a girl and her fairy friends.  Thankfully, Harrison delivers a story in which the fairies are far from friendly, and a girl named Tanya, who has the “second sight”, gets entangled in problems that seem to set her against fairies time and again.  What I really enjoyed about this story is how Harrison uses many of the trope-ish elements of fae-related story, from the use of iron and silver to not leaving any of your hair or blood laying around for a fairy to get its nefarious hands on.  This is the kind of novel that will help educate young fantasy readers about the genre, with plenty of character conflict and action.  Coming in at a 5.4ish level, I plan to purchase a copy at an upcoming school book fair to add to my classroom library.  This book can definitely be read as a stand-alone novel, but the author has a sequel out called 13 Curses that follows the storyline of  Red, one of 13 Treasures supporting characters.

Author:  Doug TenNapel

A family boat vacation gone WAAAY wrong is the premise for Bad Island.  Storm, boat crash, and one really bad island ensue.  Like Ghostopolis before it, Bad Island has graphics that I know will appeal to my fifth grade readers, and the relationships between family members will be easy for those same readers to relate to.  My favorite character is the younger sister, who has a pet snake that she sneaks on vacation and keeps close, even after the thing is dead and smelly.  I suspect that many of my students will like the monsters best–yeah, Bad Island is full of monsters.  Surprise.

Wonderstruck

Creator:  Brian Selznick

Instead of doing laundry, or “correcting” papers, or several other practical sorts of things, I spent the early evening reading Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick.  I remember enjoying The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and thinking it was interesting in structure…but I didn’t love it, innovative though it clearly was.  But I really, really liked Wonderstruck, and read it straight through.  Selznick uses both text and pictures to shape the novel in much the same way he did in Hugo Cabret.  This time the stories of two people, seemingly separated by many decades, become intertwined.  Rose is a deaf girl frustrated by the overly protective life her parents insist on as she grows up near the end of the silent film era.  Ben is just a boy in the mid-1970s when his mother dies and he is subsequently struck by lightning and loses his hearing.  Slowly their stories come together until they eventually meet and have a surprising connection to one another.

So Selznick’s genius is in using his illustrations not to enhance the text, but as an integral part of the story–it simply could not be told without the illustrations, which act like a silent movie, telling the bulk of Rose’s story in parallel to Ben’s.  Because the illustrations take up so much page-space, the book is huge, just like Hugo Cabret, but the full story is not particularly long as middle grade novels go (the level clocks in around 4.6ish).  But really what I like about Wonderstruck, what made it work for me as a reader, is that the characters feel so rich.  Ben and Rose are each lost in their own ways, each searching and yearning, and I quickly found myself right their with them in their struggles.  And that’s what makes a story for me, regardless of structure.

I am totally planning this as my next read aloud.  I’ve been toying with maybe trying a graphic novel as a read aloud, what with the fancy document camera and interactive whiteboard I’m fortunate enough to employ in my classroom.  I’ve done picture books and other short text this way, but this will be my first whole novel “on the big screen”.  I think the students will find the main characters compelling, and those same characters will provide us with many and varied opportunities for practice making inferences, which is something we always need.  I won’t be done with my current read aloud for a couple more weeks, and I’ll be counting the days until my whole class can get Wonderstruck along with me.

“Long minutes went by.  Had Daisy gotten lost?  To someone who wasn’t familiar with it, the factory could seem like a maze of hallways.  Logan was about to suggest looking for her, when Miles turned away from the window and said, ‘In the afterlife, no one has to go to the bathroom.’”

The Candymakers

Author:  Wendy Mass

There are lots of reasons to pick up a book, but at this hectic time of year, I need a good one.  School is starting, the state standardized high-stakes test is just around the corner, I have to switch out my sandals for close-toed shoes…but I was given a good reason to move The Candymakers to the top of my to-read pile.  One of my students bought a copy at the book fair, and has been telling me how great it is every other day for a week.  Not just any student, but one of those kind of mysterious students that it takes a while to figure out.  And one of the best ways I know to understand someone is to pay attention to what he or she reads.  I learned a few things about my mystery student, including that she has great taste in books!

So this is a book with four main-ish characters, and Mass separates the book into their different voices, telling the story of how they come together in a candy making contest.  Logan, Daisy, Miles, and Philip all have interesting reasons for competing, secret motivations, strange personal quirks, and one common thread–none really has any friends.  Their shared journey in this story brings them together in all sorts of ways, and is at turns funny and touching, but with plenty of action (lest you think it is all mushy-gushy emotional stuff).  I really enjoyed how the story was told from different viewpoints (it reminded me a bit of E.L. Konigsburg’s award-winning The View From Saturday), which can be tricky, but Mass brings the separate threads together smoothly.  I can’t wait to introduce this book to my class library, although I am somewhat worried.  Coming in around level 5.7ish is just right for many of my readers, but the book is over 400 pages, which is intimidating to lots of kids.  Mind you, the font is biggish, but no matter how often I explain such things, many kids just get psyched out by the size of a book.  I’m toying with this book as a read aloud, just because I love it, but the read aloud list is pretty crowded already.

The fall reading assessment window is closing this  week in my district.  My students have been weighed, they have been measured…and as I sit surrounded by data points, crafting individual goals for each of them…they have been found wanting.  Or have they?  There are of course many lenses to look at assessment data through.  It is certainly considered a more promising practice to pay as much attention to strengths as weaknesses.  And when I confer with my students, I most certainly start with a strength, because I need them to recognize themselves as capable.  They must be capable, because I then need to turn their attention to goals for improvement in fluency, comprehension, sometimes even habits and attitudes associated with their reading lives at school and at home.  My experience has (so far) shown me that readers who believe they are capable of improvement tend to improve, and readers who do not believe they can become better readers…well, there aren’t enough mini-lessons or strategy groups in the world for those poor souls.

For many of my students, I will be the first teacher who sits side by side with them to talk about their specific skill sets as readers, their choices and habits, strengths and weaknesses.  I will hand them a piece of paper with a photo of them reading at the top, and a bullet point list of 3-5 goals to focus on over the next few months.  We’ll talk about each goal, why it matters, and students will sometimes add a goal or two of their own choosing.  The “advanced” readers tend to be shocked that they would have goals for reading improvement–I always enjoy these conversations (in an evil way that I keep well hidden).  The readers who have a history of struggling usually like the goals–it gives them something more concrete to consider, instead of just embracing an identity as a “bad” reader.   I explain to all that having goals helps us focus–this is not all we need to learn, but with a little focus we may all move forward more quickly and make the most of our learning time and effort.

If only having goals were enough!  I have a degree in political science, so I learned long ago that identifying problems is laughably easy–addressing problems is where things get messy, weird, occasionally wonderful, but more often painfully frustrating.  Sometimes teaching readers feels less like science to me, and more like alchemy.  There’s a bit of science and a good chunk of magic in turning lead to gold, and it takes time.  So much time!  But when I know the specific needs of my students, and they each know their own needs, we can share the work–and that’s a pretty big deal.

So as I finish conferring with kids about reading goals, I look ahead.  I help organize interventions for students with serious issues, and I plan out strategy groups with focus points like improving out-loud phrasing and expression, or asking thoughtful questions and making predictions, or learning to vary the genres they read (“No, you can’t just keep reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid books til Christmas…sorry.”).  I consider the most widespread issues and plan units of study that will address them.  I think about who would benefit most from book clubs.

And I try to teach my students to be accountable for how they spend their reading time in class.  They have to examine their goals daily, make choices (read to self, read to someone, write in response to reading, etc.) that directly support their goals, and I teach them to articulate those choices and to track their choices so they can evaluate whether they are choosing wisely.  This is still a work in progress, because most of my students want to practice what they are already proficient at rather than push against a bit of cognitive dissonance doing something that doesn’t come as easily.  I don’t blame them–I often feel the same way.

Cahills vs. Vespers Book One:  The Medusa Plot

Author:  Gordan Korman

Woot!  This book kicks off a second series featuring Dan and Amy Cahill from the 39 Clues series.  I’m currently reading the first of that series, The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan, aloud to my class and they’re loving it.  I’ve done this before, and I always turn at least a few kids on to the rest of the series with my sneaky reading teacher ways.  I’ve been a fan of this series from the start, and I think it is amazing how so many different authors (Korman and Riordan are joined by other middle grade greats like Jude Watson and Margaret Peterson Haddix) have contributed to the series but managed to keep characters and their development fairly consistent.  I’d love to read a book about how they pulled that trick off!  In The Medusa Plot, Dan and Amy are tracking down clues across the globe once more, but instead of competing with other Cahill relatives, they are now allied with them against the Vespers, an equally ancient and possibly more deadly group who have kidnapped some members of the Cahill clan.  The clock is ticking, and the Cahills are trying to save their family, with a subplot that has Dan planning to put together the secret formula he and Amy uncovered in the first series.

I wonder if this series really stands alone, or if readers would need to have experienced the hunt for the 39 clues to appreciate Cahills vs. Vespers?  I’ve thought about it, and I’ve already steered a couple of interested kids to the first series, but that may be due to my own tendencies as a completionist.  I think the whole saga of the Cahills makes for great fifth grade reading, with the snappy banter between the brother and sister protagonists, the frequent action scenes, and the plot twists that leave readers rethinking who the good guys are.  The frequent change of setting as the Cahills race around the world is very appealing and throws in geography and history in bite-size pieces.   Having a girl and a boy both featured makes this series widely accessible–my experience is that most middle grade readers tend toward main characters of the same sex as themselves.  With 39 Clues, they don’t have to choose!

Author:  Kazu Kibuishi

I was geeked to pick up the fourth installment of the Amulet series this week–new books only come out once a year, so it is a real event.  I reread the first three, then burned through The Last Council.  In general, the Amulet books chronicle the adventures of a sister and brother who originally go into this fantastical other world to save their kidnapped mother.  The sister inherits a magic amulet that is needed to defend this embattled world against evil elves and other assorted bad guy monster types.  The Last Council turns some of my original thinking about characters on its ear, making some allies seem like enemies and vice versa.  Who can our heroes really trust?  How can they triumph?  I don’t know, and I suspect we’ll see several more books in this series before all is resolved.  And that unpredictability within the good vs. evil theme is part of what makes the story compelling.  Oh, and the pictures are cool (my favorite are of the walking houses.)

This series is SUPER popular in my classroom with both girls and boys.  I really should invest in multiple copies to satisfy the demand for these books…but that brings me to my quandry.

I grew up with comics.  I personally have collected (boarded, bagged, and boxed for preservation’s sake) hundreds of comics.  I really enjoy the occasional graphic novel.  And I have a shelf of graphic novels in my classroom, from Wimpy Kid to Amulet to Bone to graphic novellizations of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  At this time of year, that shelf looks bare as many young readers jump at the chance to start the year with “comics”.  The reason I’ve invested in so many graphic novels is partly because I want to share my love of this kind of reading, and partly because I’ve been able to use graphic novels very successfully to reach struggling and reluctant readers over the years.  But at this time of year, as I look across my classroom and see only  a handful of kids with “more substantial” novels in their hands, I get anxious.  How much actual reading is really going on?  Reading graphic novels is different than reading regular novels–the skill sets are not identical, and I don’t do lots of explicit instruction with graphic-style text.  So I worry that time is wasted.  Not because graphic novels are easy readers–far from it, they are often incredibly rich, but it seems to me that my young readers don’t have the skills to get more than the surface…and fifth grade readers need to dig a bit deeper.

Last year I took the graphic novels off the shelf in February, proclaiming that we would take a break from them to put our focus on more traditional novels.  This worked pretty well, and the majority of my comics-junkies adjusted and even flourished.  I may do the same again, or maybe have an every-other-month availability.  But is this necessary, or am I just being old-fashioned?  Sometimes I can’t distinguish between my gut instincts and my fear response, and this may be one of those times.

How graphic should I get?

The reason people emphasize how important first impressions are is because, funnily enough, first impressions are actually important.  Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of different instructional strategies in readers workshop.  I have nine months to smooth out my fifth grade readers’ rough edges, knowing they are moving out of the learning-how-to-read portion of their lives and into more complex reading tasks.  The clock is ticking (at least in my brain), telling me that the window for making lifelong readers is CLOSING.  Yeah, I know that’s not necessarily so, and yet…maybe it is so for some of my young readers.

So how do I start the year in terms of reading?  There are so many important lessons, but I think it is important to start and end with one teaching point that endures, that connects the fifth grade reading year together.  So my first and last lessons in readers workshop are pretty much identical.  The teaching point:  reading is powerful–one of the most powerful things in the world.  There are lots of ways that I thread this message through the year, in stories that reveal how the ability or inablity to read, the access to or denial of the written word, have changed lives–have changed history.  But to start, I want my students to see that reading can be personally powerful–that what we read and how we read impact us in ways both large and small.  So I do something kind of scary, at least as far as first day lessons go.

I read a story that is powerful to me.  The story I choose every year (so far) is Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco.  There are plenty of good reasons for a fifth grade teacher to read Pink and Say.  It is set during the Civil War.  It is a family story handed down to Polacco, and history is the primary focus of fifth grade social studies.  Polacco is a Michigan author, and that is where my class lives and learns.  But the real reason I read Pink and Say as my first lesson is because, no matter how many times I read it, it tears me apart.  As I read the last pages, I openly weep, I pause to dry my tears, then weep some more.  There is a little snot involved–that’s how they know I’m not putting them on about the lesson, I suppose.  The kids have known me as a teacher less than a few days, and I am coming a little bit apart before their eyes.

It is scary for me to be so vulnerable before I really know these people.  In past years, I’ve looked out at their faces during these moments, and many are surprised, some even shocked.  A few laugh nervously.  A few have tears in their eyes, too.  And I explain to them why I chose the story, how it makes me think and feel intensely every time I read it.  How reading is deeply personal, deeply powerful, and how we will spend the whole year learning this most important reading lesson.

And we move on with our day, our year together.  They will see me laugh out loud, and cry out loud, and get angry and confused and even occasionally bored as we read together through the year.  I want them to be open to the power of story, of text of all kinds, and I try very hard to show them how that looks and sounds every day.  And at the end of the year, I’ll read Pink and Say again, and I’ll weep again.  Because reading is, at its best, powerful.  Which means that teaching reading is powerful too–radically, rebelliously, joyously powerful.

“Felicity kept lumbering in his direction…gnashing her teeth…clawing the air…Soon she was just a few lurches away…Stanley weighed his options:  Mauled by a zombie?  Or yelled at by his teacher?  He shrunk down as small as he could make himself at his desk.  He decided he was more afraid of Mr. Baldengrumpy.” (p. 93-94)

Zombiekins

Author:  Kevin Bolger

Kevin Bolger has great book titles–his other book is called Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger.  You can tell this guy taught elementary school.  Young Stanley buys an unusual stuffed animal from a creepy old lady’s yard sale, and it turns out to be–you guessed it–a zombie.  He takes it to school.  Craziness ensues.  This story is what we in the teachery business call a “high interest” title.  My students won’t walk away changed, moved and instilled with life lessons, but they sure will giggle a lot and pass this book on to their buddies.  One of my favorite things about Zombiekins is how Bolger portrays most every adult as clueless.  This is a common trope in children’s literature (think Roald Dahl and Lemony Snickett), and it works here.  I just hope that many students get a chance to read and enjoy Zombiekins before one of them steals it from the classroom library.

So, what’s the hero of our next book like?

“You would NEVER have picked Hiccup out of those ten boys to be the Hero of this story.  Snotlout was good at everything and a natural leader.  Dogsbreath was as tall as his father and could do amusing things like farting to the tune of the Berk national anthem.  Hiccup was just absolutely average, the kind of unremarkable, skinny, freckled boy who was easy to overlook in a crowd.”  (p. 15)

How to Train Your Dragon

Author:  Cressida Cowell

I saw the movie version of this last month–it was cute.  It is also only tenuously connected to the book.  The plot is quite different, and the character development is also different.  Another thing I should come clean on–I listened to the audiobook version of this novel while on a road trip.  In the book, Hiccup is your typical overly-ordinary-seeming kid who doesn’t quite fit in with his big, brutal Viking community–and of course it is his differences that ultimately make him a hero.  The dragons in the book are rather cheeky and self-interested, which ends up being important to the plot.  This book, along with others in the series, level in the 6.5-ish area, but I had lots of fifth grade readers just burning through the series last year.  That was in part because the movie came out, but I think so many kids kept up with the series because it is humorous, has fun illustrations, and features the classic unlikely-hero story arc that appears in many of the books that appeal most to the middle grade readers.  This is a series that will outlast the popularity of the movie for sure, and I look forward to book talks with students now that I’m up to speed on this Hiccup lad and his wacky Viking life.

For Writers Workshop:  So there’s a lot of interesting work with text font and size in this book.  When dragons speak, they have a different font from humans, one that kind of suggests fire.  Thoughtshots are done in italics, which is a common choice that my students need to be aware of for writers, and Cowell does lots of all-caps words for emphasis.  This book is a goldmine for teaching strategies for using text aesthetics to convey a variety of moods and emotions.