Comprehension Club
In book clubs, students learn to share their own thinking, reading, writing, and talking with instructional guidance and with the collaborative meaning-making with their peers. They learn to share their deep thinking about the book: thinking within, beyond, and about a text. Through reflective, academic conversation about books, teachers and students create the vibrant, literate classroom community that best supports high-level, quality comprehension. The collaborative, interactive nature of the student book club enables all students to find the support they need to fully engage with the books. Book clubs foster student choice and provide middle-schoolers with lots of opportunities to make decisions, take responsibility for reading their books on time, and be prepared to talk about texts in ways that bolster self-confidence, spark engagement, and build community around books (Haas, 2013; Guthrie, 2008).
Book clubs help young tweens discover themselves as readers with unique reading preferences and needs. Tweens begin to use reading to help answer profound questions about themselves and the world.
Expectations
Students will read the book in class and at home. Students often may listen to their text while reading along using audio on the scholastic website. Audio may count for up to 50% of weekly independent reading minutes.
Every 2 to 4 weeks, students will meet as a group to discuss their thinking about their reading. Group assignments will help guide student lead discussions on their chosen text. Sticky notes should be placed in books to help students guide their discussion. Each group will meet during guided reading time. Students should come to group eager to share, question, analyze, and discuss. At the end of each discussion, students will be asked to evaluate what went well, or not, with their discussion. Students will not have to complete a book to participate and partial credit is possible.
In order for a student to receive full participation credit, they will need to 1.) come to group with their book and assignments 2.) cite text evidence to back up their ideas, and 3.) voluntarily speak in group adding to peers' ideas and be considerate of those not as confident. The group discussion is graded using the rubric for collaborative discussions as a guide.
Written Entries should be kept neat and organized. Ideas should be recorded as complete thoughts using sentences and paragraphs. The purpose of the book club is to explore the meaning of text, analyze how the text was crafted, and express thinking about meaning; therefore, all conversation should be grounded in text. Passages and quotes from the book (with accompanying page numbers) should always be used to back up their thinking. A large portion of the grade will be based on a student's ability to cite text evidence AND tell how the citation helped them better understand the story. Comprehension Club is NOT summarizing what happened in the book nor retelling the story.
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