I am a Special Education teacher at Truckee High School and I teach three 90 minute Learning Centers as well as coteach an English class in the spring. The past couple of years Truckee High School has set some strong academic goals to support school wide literacy with the purpose of helping the students not only understand rigorous academic text and literary terms, but also to support them in establishing a life full of literacy. In order to help my students explore a variety of texts and build a love for reading I started a book club with all of my learning center classes. Every day for the first 15 minutes of class we read as a group from a novel that has been hand picked by me after working with the school Librarian and researching popular adolescent novels. At first when the program was rolled out my students fought me on the new "mandatory" reading time, however once they realized that we were purely going to read "non academic" texts for enjoyment and that I would read to them, they quickly became engaged. My daily conversation with the students quickly shifted from “do we have to read today” to "can we just read a little bit more." They have learned to LOVE this time spent as a group reading and often students that would never read out loud even when asked to by their teachers will now volunteer to read out loud to the group. I have other students who continue to read after the class has stopped reading, just because they want to find out what happens in the book. Since last year was such an amazing experience for both myself and my students I have included Book Club into my daily routine this year. Book Club is something that I would like to see continue for years to come.
I have mapped out my next set of Book Club novels that I would like to read with my students this year. However, funds are very low and only a select few of the students in learning center can afford to buy their own copy. The school library and town library usually only have a copy or two of the specific novel my Book Club is reading. Last year I ended up purchasing several books for my class out of pocket, unfortunately this is not something I can continue to do. Prior to school starting I put in a request through the Truckee Optimist Club so that I could have new novels ordered and ready to for the start of school. My request was granted and I was able to purchase 6 different novels (10 copies each) to help me obtain our Book Club goal of reading two novels a quarter. This is a very lofty and exciting goal, but it also means that I need to supply 8 to 10 copies of 24 different novels.
The great news is that the books never go to waste. There are three Resource Specialist teachers on site at Truckee High School. Once my three classes are finished with the novel, I then pass them off to the other learning center teachers. They read them with their Book Clubs and then give them back to me. The novels I am including in this grand request will be used for years to come. Once the books have passed through the hands of 90 students and 6 to 9 different book clubs (depending on semester) they are then brought back to my room and placed in my reading nook. The reading nook is a corner of my room with bookcases filled with novels, comfortable seating, yoga mats, carpet and other items that encourage reading. This is an area that students can sit in and read when they are caught up on their work. Students are encouraged to explore all the different texts in the reading nook and check books out to read. Students that are not in my learning center often come into my room asking to borrow a book they know I have. I mark what year we read the book as a class so that every 4 years I will be able to read the books again with my new learning center book clubs.