Running a book club: Building a community
Published on: 07 December 2023
Book groups help to generate a thriving reading culture in your school. Once you have created an identity for your club, ensure you publicise it and knit it into your reading offer. Here are some suggestions of what this might look like:
- Create a webpage on your school website. This could take the form of a blog that tells your wider community what books you are reading, author contacts, and so on.
- Invite parents and carers to meetings. Children love this, to share their favourite books and the special nature of the club.
- Set up parallel parent groups to read the books. This has proved to be especially powerful in communities where reading does not have a high status. In some cases, you will see adults who have not picked up a book since school read – and these are the parents of kids in your clubs.
- Use https://whatimreading.org/ to promote the books you are reading in book club to the rest of the school.
- Organise book fairs run by the club. Often bookshops will donate a portion of their profits which can help finance books for the club.
- Set up a reading teachers group in your school – making reading 'whole' school transforms reading in your setting (and makes a welcome change to pupil progress staff meetings once a term!)
- Join a reading teachers scheme beyond your school such as RT=RP. The ideas you gain and the links you create all come back to enrich your own practice.
