Celebrate reading is a blog where high school students at Stover High School will post reviews and talk about books they enjoy. Many students attend our weekly book club and they enjoy talking about the great books they read.
As the librarian, I enjoy spending time with the students and suggesting books they may like. I also can’t wait to hear about a book that they think I should read.
So let the celebration begin…..
For the past several years, I have thought about hosting book clubs in my school, but frankly I was afraid that no one would want to come and I didn’t want to be a failure. I knew the benefits of hosting book clubs but would the students and the teachers embrace the book clubs? One day sitting at the lunch table with several teachers I approached the subject of a faculty book club and to my surprise there was a lot of interest. We set the first day as the following Thursday morning at 7:15. To my surprise I had 12 staff members attend. We decided not to read the same book as we all had a huge different taste in books. We would go around and talk about the books we were reading and from this we might decide to broaden our reading tastes. Three years later, the TMZ (Thursday Morning Zeal) book club is still going strong.
This year, I had a huge number of freshmen always in the library talking about books, so I mentioned a book club to them and boy were they excited! We now meet each Wednesday during lunch and we have lunch and talk about books we are reading. They named their book club, The Page Turners. The girls would like to read the same book and then skype with an author so we are deciding on a title and will contact the author to see if we can set that up.
Now this past week, thanks to Colby Sharp (@colbysharp and Donalyn Miller (@donalynbooks) I have joined the Nerdy Book Club and I can enjoy talking books to other book lovers all over the United States. Boy, am I ever grateful for stepping out of my comfort zone and starting the book clubs in my school.
