Try a book-club was a programme ran to give children the opportunity to take part in a book-club and determine whether it was something they would enjoy. Our monthly junior book-club is well subscribed to by children who are heavy library users. It was hoped that the programme would encourage reluctant children to try something new. Children were given six weeks to read the book . This gave all reading levels a chance to read the book at their reading pace.
The programme was ran alongside the Summer Stars reading programme. It was hoped that this would give children with a lot of after school activities an opportunity to take part. The book chosen was ‘Tin’ by Pádraig Kenny. Slightly difficult in storyline which I felt was important to challenge the children.
The programme was well subscribed with a group of twelve children taking part. These were mixed in age, gender and reading interests. During the meeting, I gave an introduction to book-clubs and we set some ground rules for discussion . Each child got an opportunity to discuss their opinion of the book which varied in length. This was guided with follow up questions from me which hoped to further critical discussion. Afterwards, we furthered discussion of character depth by drawing our own robots based on the main characters in the book. This allowed the children to understand the process of character creation and descriptive writing.
The event was well received by the children and the group were open to discussion. Four of the twelve children signed up for the monthly book-club afterwards and have become key members to our discussions. The event allowed our library to provide an inclusive event in the summer programme that’s only limit was that children had to be between eight and twelve.