I'm a Library Media Specialist serving six hundred K-5 students. I frequently have conversations with my students about their favorite chapter books and the characters and conflicts that bring these stories to life. We often find ourselves making lasting connections as we laugh together while sharing mental images and distinct interpretations that emerge from our shared reading.
All my discussions with students have demonstrated their love for reading, but even more profoundly they have shown me how reading together can be a catapult into wonderful, thought-provoking, and even hilarious discourse about new places, concepts, and problems.
These wonderful discussions invariably lead to inspired students telling classmates about must-reads and planting seeds of wonder that can grow our community of readers one book at a time
My Project
The proposed Community Book Club will facilitate and inspire a reading community that encourages independent reading. It will serve as a platform for readers to dive deeper into the content that we read together. Selections will cultivate empathy and an appreciation for cultural differences. The pandemic’s mandate to increase the use of technology has certainly reduced our opportunities to share belly-laughs about books in the library, but more generally, the pandemic has reduced all of our opportunities for human connections. The Community Book Club is one strategy for bridging this gap in our student’s social-emotional development and will allow them to connect with a community of readers on a weekly basis via Google Meet. The students will be encouraged to analyze the text through open discourse among participants. If the school is reopened during the school year meetings will be face-to-face in the school library's media center, but the books purchased with project funds will still be needed.
Our hope is to cultivate a community of readers who are able to openly discuss complex issues so that they can develop the lifelong skills necessary to acquire knowledge, hear other’s perspectives, and see the power of communities in action as they share their thoughts and work together.
Student participants who are unable to purchase a copy of the selected book(s) will be provided a book through the support of Donors Choose.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Boone and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.