So as mentioned before, every Friday I’m helping to run a book club with our year sevens (age 11/12). They’re taking part in the Carnegie shadowing scheme and so far it’s been successful, with three curious new faces last week at our third meeting. I wanted to do some posts about activities we’ve done and activities I hope to do. ‘Share your ideas and resources’ was something that came up a lot at library camp so here I go. I’ll probably edit this post a lot as I think up more activities and I’ll link up other posts I do on how they went too.
Tension graphs: This was something we tried last week, at
the suggestion of my colleague. Her idea was to get them to plot the ‘action
level’ of each chapter of their books onto a graph. I took that idea and
simplified it. We only have half an hour for our meetings so this needed to be
snappy, and I wanted to do something that involved them working as a team.
We divided them up into ‘book groups’, so some who had read
‘Ghost hawk’ in one group, other’s who’d read ‘The Child’s Elephant’ in
another, and so on until we had a few of the books represented. I then had one
group at a time up at the front where I’d stood a giant flip-chart, and they
plotted the tension levels of their book on a graph, 10 being very tense and 0
not very tense at all. Sort of like this:
This is in no way an accurate representation of their
feelings on the books – there was a lot more fluctuations and scribbles as they
argued back and forth about which bits were more tense!
This went down really well. We had a few new members, so it
was good to let them see the other member’s thoughts on a few of the books to
help them choose what they wanted to read first. Our one rule at book club is
NO SPOILERS. So it was interesting to let them explain why they were rating the
middle a 10, for example, without giving anything away. Lots of giggling ensued
when they made their lines really erratic for uber-emotional parts. It was nice
to let them have the floor for a change as well, giving them confidence (not
that most of them need any confidence boosting!) and hopefully getting across
their enthusiasm to each other.
So that was last week. Add that activity to the way we
always start, which is swapping all the books around for those who’ve finished,
and we finished right on target time-wise. So this activity lasted us about 20
mins: Dividing them into groups, letting them discuss between themselves for a bit
and finally allowing each group to come and draw on the graph and allowing for
discussion at the end. Oh, and cake eating, there was lots of that too.
Other activities I hope to do in the future include:
Quotes Quiz. This is already prepared for Friday, so I’ll let
you all know how that goes. Basically I’ll be reading out eight quotes and they
have to match it up with the eight books in the shortlist that we’re shadowing.
They’ll be in teams and to save on time I’m made some answer sheets so they can
just write “Quote 1” next to the picture of the book they think it matches to. [Edit: See here for how it went]
3 word/One sentence reviews. I was hoping to get a video of
each of the pupils holding up one of the books they’ve read so far and
describing it in three words. For the shyer members, we could maybe have words
written on whiteboards and held up. I could then go away and edit the video,
putting funky music in etc to show at the next meeting. I think a lot of them
might like the chance to be in the limelight. I’ll suggest it on Friday and see
what they think.
A characters meeting. What it says on the tin. Questions
about the characters that have most affected/annoyed our readers. Prompt
questions like “If you were stuck on a desert island with one character, which
one would it be and why?” “Which character would you most like to date?” “One character has to keep you alive in a
video game, who would it be and why?” etc.
Crafts! I have no idea what, but I love crafts so I’ll have
to think of something! Bookmarks maybe. Book themed bracelets even. Who knows.
Two truths and a lie: A general icebreaker. Perhaps for a
meeting when not many of them have finished their books. Everyone goes around
and says three facts about themselves, two are truth one is a lie. The others
have to figure out which is the lie. Good team building I suppose, but perhaps
a bit null, as they already live at school together. I just added this as I did
it at uni and really enjoyed myself.
Movies: Discussing which of the books would make good
movies. General discussion about which other books they’ve been reading have
made good movies and seeing which actors/actresses they would like to star in a
movie adaptation.
And that’s all I’ve got for now. If I end up doing any of
these and writing a blog post on them I’ll link them up back to here. SO MUCH
LINKAGE. Any other suggestions would be fabulous if anyone out there is reading
this. Lemme know.
Over and out.
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