Starting a Beginning Reader Book Club

Have you been enjoying the Guessing Geisel posts this year? Are you looking for fresh programming ideas? Why not squish them together by starting a book club for beginning readers!

I have now had two sessions of my newly-minted Beginning to Read Book Club, and although building a following for a new program can take time, I’m having a blast. My goal with this post is to share the resources I used in my planning, talk a bit about why such a book club can be a good addition to a programming lineup, and share what I’ve done so far and what I plan to try in the future.

First and foremost, I must give credit to the lovely ladies at Jbrary (truly, where would we all be without them?) Not surprisingly, they have a post about starting a beginning reader book club, and it was invaluable to me during the planning phase. Another useful resource is this SLJ article about beginning reader book clubs around the country. And finally, all of the wonderful Guessing Geisel reviews this year served as both inspiration and resource as I put together my list of titles for the coming months.

Book clubs are in many ways a natural fit for libraries: we get to show off our collection, talk about books we like with folks in our community, connect members of the community with one another, and create positive library experiences. I wanted to offer a literary program to fill the gap between storytime and the book clubs we offer for older kids. I also wanted to demystify the beginning reader section for patrons and showcase an often confusing and intimidating collection.

Given that this was a new program for my library and I wasn’t sure what reading levels might show up to the first meeting, I decided to start with the basics: the Elephant and Piggie series. I pulled several titles from the series and set them up on a table, and also set up a craft. I borrowed heavily from Jbrary for the structure of my meetings, so I won’t recreate that here; the only differences are that I don’t have participants register for the program, and I don’t always have multiples of the titles, so instead I’m using series where I can order several and let the kids all pick a different one (or more!) to check out if they want. They don’t need to read anything ahead of time to participate. At the meetings, we decide which title from the series we want to read together, and how we want to read it—I can read it to them, they can read it to me, or we can all take turns reading a page. So far they have always chosen to read at least some of it themselves.

I had one reader show up to the first session, and although he was able to read longer books, he enjoyed the Elephant and Piggie titles, and we spent some time decoding the images and speech bubbles and talking about the characters. Meeting two showcased the Pig in a Wig books, and this time I had three participants of slightly varying reading levels. All were comfortable reading the books, so after we had read the first few pages, we paused and spent a few minutes noticing the rhyme scheme and guessing what might happen on the next page based on that pattern. We also talked about the end papers—which in this series provide clues to the content of the story—and used the end papers to make educated guesses about what might happen in the titles from the series that we hadn’t read together.

Next meeting I plan to branch out into nonfiction, with the slightly more challenging Disgusting Critters series by Elise Gravel. Other series I’d like to explore in the coming months include Charlie and Mouse and Fox and Chick, both of which will be useful in introducing chapters and talking about themes and character in greater depth.

Has anyone else started a club for beginning readers? Anyone else thinking about it? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments!