By Janet MacLeod
Our secondary school is located in the heart of Hamilton, Ontario’s downtown. Students at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School come from all corners of the world and from our own city. This past summer we ran our third successful Teen Summer Book Club. Our school is closing this June and we will be joining another downtown high school at a new building under a new name. Our students are already asking whether there will be a book club at the new school. I hope that the answer will be yes as we feel that the club benefited our teens in all the ways that reading does and through the summer has filled a gap for a time often without books.
Getting the Readers
Our summer book club wouldn’t have been possible without our six years of developing and building up our Forest of Reading White Pine Book Club during the school year. We have worked to develop a club that would be inclusive and fun. The five meetings of our Forest of Reading club involve trips, snacks and prizes. Our school has many students whose first language is something other than English, as well as students who don’t always come from print rich homes. We wanted to make all our students feel welcome even if, in the end, they just read one of the ten Forest of Reading books. To help make that happen, our library learning commons staff talks about our club to anyone who will listen, visiting classrooms with book talks in the fall, creating monthly book displays during the school year club (from December to April) and sharing posts about the club on social media. It has led to many students trying our book club. We have been ecstatic by its success at getting numbers of teens reading. For example, in mid April 2017, we had fifty students who had read and reported on one or more of the White Pine books that year.
Like our school yearbook club, we wanted to make the Teen Summer Book Club fun (beyond the usual rewards of reading). We made our club “uniform” a pair of flip flops (we bought them from Old Navy at Flip Flop day prices) enhanced with ribbon decorated with our club name. We used retro library bags from our library stash (think 1980’s library designs) and later, bags from publishers and our own school library designed bags. These bags also held surprises- freebies from publishers, like bookmarks and pins, as well as a coupon for an ice-cream cone courtesy of our supportive principal. Finally, the bags held a variety of books to be enjoyed over the summer.
Getting the Books
Our first summer book club was launched in part by the kind generosity of the talented Canadian author, Teresa Toten. We had purchased her latest young adult book, Beware That Girl and I had thought it would make a popular summer read. In emailing Teresa, she kindly forwarded my request to someone at her publisher’s, who agreed to send us books. We’ve had similar luck with other publishers and sometimes with the authors themselves. We have received multiple advanced copies and other times, the published books. Our first summer we were happy to add Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan and Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety by Ann Y. K. Choi, both good books by talented Canadian authors who were wonderful speakers and very generous to our club.
We started our Teen Summer Book Club with the goal of supporting twenty to thirty readers. If we did not have enough copies of a selected title to cover all club members, we’ve handled it in a couple of ways. First, we’ve supplemented the copies by purchasing a few copies ourselves, as well as using our library processed copy. Secondly, we’ve then had students select the books that they most wanted to read. We tracked the book selections, and then students were asked to bring those books to trade with others at our mid-summer meet-up.
Connecting with Authors
Part of the fun of our Teen Summer Book Club is definitely our contact with the authors of the books. Previously, through the school year, we’d enjoyed this contact through our White Pine book club – making connections with authors on Twitter and at the OLA Super Conference. We’d even had a number of White Pine authors drop by our club meetings to meet our readers, as well as answer questions online. We also booked authors to come in for a longer sessions.
During our first Teen Summer Book Club, we were visited by three authors of the summer books, Catherine Egan, Ann Y. K. Choi and Teresa Toten. All three were amazing. Our students greatly enjoyed their talks and visits. Student engagement and the authors’ generosity cannot be overstated.
In more recent summers, authors have also been very generous, sending us bookmarks and books and responding to our social media shares. This interaction with the author definitely adds a special level of engagement for our readers.
Maker Activities on Social Media
Since we would not be meeting throughout the summer- except for our August meet-up- we wanted to still have contact with our club members, hopefully inspiring them to spend more time reading and also hearing their thoughts on the books. The goal of our club was also to have the feel of a summer camp, complete with activities and crafts. To this end, I ran a Twitter Tuesday event each week, involving a challenge or maker activity. We sent home letters to parents with permission forms to let parents know that we would be “meeting” over Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Participants then brought back signed consent forms.
At the start of summer, students were also given a paper bag filled with items from our library stash (duct tape, old catalogue cards, patterned paper, etc.) , as well as items from the dollar store. Before the end of school, we organized the supplies into a challenge bag based on themes from the books.
See below the eight challenges from this past summer with the specific book it was inspired by:
Challenges were shared over social media and prizes were picked up at our August meetup or in the first days of school. We matched the prizes to specific summer books as well. Several prizes were donated – like one from the new Starbucks across the street from our school. The donated coffee mugs were in honour of the coffee meet-up in 9 Days & 9 Nights, by Katie Cotugno. Our local movie theatre also donated movie tickets, perfect for the film-creating main character in From Twinkle with Love by Sandhya Menon.
HPL Meet-Up and Wrap-Up (August and September)
Another benefit in running a regular book club through the school year is forming a partnership with our local library. We have partnered with the Hamilton Public Library (HPL) over the years in running our White Pine book club, with them hosting one of our five school year book club meetings each year and also giving us prizes for our readers. With our Teen Summer Book Club we continued this partnership and they hosted our mid-summer meet up with a sunny library spot, treats and even a tour of their impressive Makerspace area.
We gave students a trip permission form in early June for this HPL meet-up and they returned it before the beginning of summer.
Students also gained points throughout the summer for reading and participating in challenges. We created a “Game Card” that they filled out so that we could easily tally their points and crown an Ultimate Fan of Summer in the fall. Another wrap up activity we have enjoyed is a Kahoot game we played in teams, solving trivia from all the summer books.
Our Teen Summer Book Club has been well received over the past three years that we’ve run it. After the first year our students were ready to sign up again as soon as the summer approached. One of our students who moved and went to another school harassed her new teacher-librarian about starting a book club so much that the teacher-librarian wrote to me to jokingly complain AND in the end, started her own club during the school year. One of the greatest joys in being a teacher-librarian is sparking the love of reading that is sometimes dormant in our students. Running a book club through the summer is one way to keep that flame lit from June to September.
Please take a look at some of our students’ creations!
Janet MacLeod is the teacher-librarian at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School in Hamilton, Ontario. Janet is currently experiencing the first shocks (and freedoms) of empty nest syndrome. She lives with her husband and one elderly guinea pig left behind by her two daughters both now at university. She enjoys reading, writing, scrapbooking and working on her fitness with her teacher boot camp group.
Twitter: @theSJAMlibrary
Website: sjamlibrary.ca