Wishtree Book Club

Mrs. Peyton and I so enjoy our times together doing Book Clubs. She does the Social/Emotional Learning piece, and I do some English/Language Arts stuff. The kids do the rest - we have such a good time. This group was amazingly insightful and hard working. They were a perfect group for us to enjoy this book for the very first time.

Forest North Comic Book Club Convention

We had the best time in Comic Book Club today learning from industry professionals! Mrs. Rapé, our Forest North Office Specialist, used to be a comic book inker! Mrs. Lajaunie, who used to work at Forest North, now owns local comic shop Titan Moon! They gave us all kinds of interesting information! Check out the video on my tweet.

Enrichment Book Clubs Are Underway

Enrichment Book Clubs have started at Forest North! One of the first things librarians like to do when they start book clubs is take a reading inventory. Check out what Forest North Eagles like to read about! 

These Enrichment Book Clubs meet during grade levels' intervention time so that students can work in smaller groups across a grade level. Librarians meet with one group of students per grade level each week and work through books together throughout the year. It's a fun and bonding way to learn. Mrs. Fournier & Mrs. Young love it!                     

War That Saved My Life: Book Club Wrap Up

As always, Mrs. Peyton and I adored spending time with our special book club friends. This book club group was especially responsible in staying up with their reading, and also had the most insightful things to say about this amazing book. We celebrated our last meeting with a tea party, because there was a tea party motif in the book. What fun! A few weeks later, 5th graders were invited to jot down their favorite elementary school memory. Mrs. Peyton and I were so touched to see that one student chose this book club as his fondest memory. What a compliment.

Friendship Book Club Celebration

Mrs. Peyton and I were sad that our 2nd grade Friendship Book Club came to an end yesterday! These kids were amazing readers, always responsible with their assignments, and were great strategists at Mancala!  We celebrated the end of Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie with pickle flavored popcorn, cookies (sans pickle juice!) and watching a video interview of the author, Julie Sternberg, on the library's 70" monitor!  

5th Grade Book Club Members Voracious

Mrs. Peyton and I are so impressed with the members of our 5th grade Book Club. We are having such a good time together reading "The War That Saved My Life" by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. This is a very special book you won't want to miss.

These readers are positively voracious.  They're very responsible with their books, follow the rules we made together, and on top of all that, have the most insightful discussions. 

They don't miss any of the subtleties of this book, and handle the issues within the text with compassion and grace.  The protagonist, Ada, is born with a club foot, and spends her life confined to a small London apartment with no running water or indoor plumbing, abused and neglected by her mother who is embarrassed by her differences. When WWII begins, children are encouraged to go to the countryside to avoid getting bombed.  Ada's mom forbids it, but Ada still sneaks onto the train anyway.  What is life like for her outside of the apartment?

2nd Grade Friendship Book Club Plays Mancala

2nd grade Friendship book club is going swimmingly - most of our members, in fact, couldn't help it, and they went ahead and read the rest of the book!  Since we're so far ahead, we took a week to play mancala, a game featured prominently in our book "Pickle Juice on a Cookie" by Julie Sternberg.

For fans of her book, good news- there are two sequels, both available in your Forest North library!  Come check them out today!

2nd Grade Book Club "Nerd" Badges

Sometimes, your 2nd grade book club insists you make them "Book Club Nerd" badges. When this happens, you do it, of course.

First Grade Book Club Finishes Frecklejuice

First grade finished reading Freckle Juice yesterday, a classic that totally stands the test of time!

To celebrate finishing the book, and because we're silly (just being honest!), the club decided to make our own freckles.  We made them blue just like Andrew does, but instead of a marker, we made them from paper and taped them on our faces so we could remove them after photos!

We loved the silly premise of this book, how the teacher turned out to be nicer than she seemed in the beginning, and how gross the recipe for making Freckle Juice was- no wonder it gave Andrew a stomachache!

Freckle Juice is the 6th book we've read so far this year!  Way to go, Book Club!

First Grade Book Club Reads "Frecklejuice"

First Grade book club has been my most well-read group this year.  We have zoomed through so many texts! They also are very diverse readers.  We rank our books 1-5 after each book, and they love realistic fiction, scary books (Bunnicula is Clara's jam!), graphic novels, and historical stories. 

Our most recent book is "Frecklejuice" by Judy Bloom (an oldie but a goodie!)  We did the math yesterday when we noticed that our character paid 5 dimes for a recipe for freckle juice.  Turns out it's $0.50!

2nd Graders Chosen for Friendship Book Club

Mrs. Peyton, our counselor, and I love collaborating on book clubs together!  We take a book and talk about our feelings and dive deep into the text.  We started a new one yesterday with some amazing 2nd grade readers.  They each took turns reading aloud the first few chapters yesterday and I was bowled over by how much fluency and voice they already have developed when they read aloud. It's going to be a really fun group!

2nd Grade Studies Technology Over Time Through "A Fine Dessert"

by guest blogger Mrs. Young

Second grade students recently studied how technology has changed over the years.  We continued what they were learning in the classroom during our time in the library. In our first lesson, we observed and discussed changes in transportation, communication and recreation technology.  In our next lesson, we read the book A Fine Dessert, which shows families cooking the same dessert, blackberry fool, over four centuries!  We compared and contrasted the technology of making this dessert through that time.  A major ingredient of the dessert was whipped cream, so for our final lesson we divided into groups and used different kitchen tools that were used by the families in the book to make whipped cream.  We compared our results with those in the book, got a little exercise, and finally, got to try some blackberry fool ourselves.  We all agreed that it was a fine dessert.

4th Grade Bibliotherapy Book Club

You may remember a post from last October showing Aiden reading an excerpt from our beloved Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri.  He was part of a special book club of focused and engaged young men that met with Mrs. Peyton and myself.  We had so much fun working with this great group of boys and they did a great job staying on top of reading and having insightful conversations about growing up, what it means to be a man and to belong in a group. We also made some new friendships!

Our cowboys, after decorating their saddle bags.

Mrs. P eyton and our readers (and one mom who came to celebrate with us!) decorating their saddle bags.

At the end of each session, this student's sister came in with her class to checkout as a group, and the love they showed each other would always make my day!  What a great example of sibling love!

Staff Book Club Announces February Title

The Forest North staff (and former staff!) met last week to discuss "Elizabeth is Missing" by Emma Healey.  We had a great discussion about aging, the elderly, family dynamics and dementia.

We also announced our February title, which will be "Luckiest Girl Alive" by Jessica Knoll.  We're meeting at the end of the month to discuss that book!

"Luckiest Girl Alive" is the 29th selection of the Forest North staff book club.  We've been meeting since 2011, and were founded by counselor Jill Peyton and myself.  We'll see you at the end of the month!

Kindergarten Book Club

This year I've been thrilled to extend our book club offerings to Kindergarten.  We've done one-time book studies, but this is my first time to meet weekly with a group where we choose texts we want to read together and study them together at a deeper level.  We meet once a week on Wednesdays. These students read way above grade level and can make astounding connections and conclusions about literature already. It never ceases to amaze me. 

Last week, we read Stone Soup by Marcia Brown (1948 Caldecott Honor winner) and learned about hyphens. What an enthusiastic group of readers!  This week, we are adapting the text into a readers' theater and will video our performance to show the rest of Kindergarten.  In the meanwhile, feel free to check out the video below of someone else reading the book on YouTube. What fun!

4th Grade Book Club Celebration

by guest blogger Mrs. Young

The fourth grade book club met weekly this semester to discuss The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo.  We all fell in love with this book, even though there was some hesitation at first because we had a tie vote when choosing which book to read.  One student who had initially voted for the other book stood up one day, held the book above his head and cheered, "This is the best book ever!"  We marveled at DiCamillo's story telling and how all of the different characters were connected.  We analyzed dark and light imagery and realized how it applied not only to actual dark and light, but to character's personalities and even their souls!  One book club member said the book showed him the difference between good and evil.  Another said it helped him know that no matter how small you are, you can still do big things.

To celebrate our time together we ate soup, which is very important to the plot of the story, and watched scenes from the movie to compare and contrast with the book.  The movie, although good, was VERY different from the book and the group was curious about whether the author approved of the movie or not.

Fifth Grade Book Club Celebration

by guest blogger Mrs. Young

The fifth grade book club met weekly last semester to discuss Hoot by Carl Hiaasan.  We reviewed story elements and discussed how these played out in the book.  We spent a lot of time analyzing characters and making predictions because Hiaasan's writing style left us with many unanswered questions at first.  We liked how the different story lines eventually intersected and all of the characters ended up meeting each other.  This answered many of our questions and our predictions were often right!  We also discussed being led by your brain or by your heart (a quote from the mom in the book) and how that applied to the characters and to us.  And we learned interesting facts about burrowing owls!  

We celebrated our time together by decorating cupcakes like owls and watching scenes from the movie to compare and contrast with the book.

Third Grade Book Club Celebration

by guest blogger Mrs. Young

The third grade book club met (almost) weekly this semester to discuss Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater.  We had fun comparing the technology available during Mr. Popper's time with that in our own.  We even used the iPads to watch live feed from the South Pole and a penguin exhibit at Sea World!  We used context clues from the the book to research and determine what kind of penguins we thought belonged to Mr. Popper and whether they were portrayed accurately in the book.  We celebrated the end of our time together by decorating penguin shaped sugar cookies and watching scenes from the recent movie to compare with the book.  We were really excited when a character in the book said that the penguins were Gentoos, which is one of the species that we had come up with through our research!