Getting Started

Before we could get started on making our book club we had to figure out a few things. We first needed to understand the basics of what a book club was because neither of us had ever lead one before. We looked up “how to make a book club” online and found some really good articles about how to make one. This was a good basis for us and made us feel confident in starting one - so we did.

We first had decide on what types of books we were going to be reading and we came up with the idea of reading and unpacking junior leveled books because there were some great ones that we remembered from our youth. We then had to decide on how many members we would have - we did not want too many but we needed enough to create engaging discussion. We decided on no more than ten members, but we knew we needed at least five. From there we had to come up with a meeting place and time and decided on weekly meetings on Tuesdays in between classes at the couches in the Education Building. This proved to be a comfy and a social area where members felt relaxed. At first we had the meeting run for 30 minutes but we soon realized we needed time for general conversation so our meetings ran for about an hour.

For the reading of the books, we had to decide on how much we were to read for each session. If the book was split into parts like “Silverwing” then we had everyone just read one part for each book club meeting. For other books we would go off their size and if they were smaller like “Bad Beginnings” then we had them read half one week and the other half the next. For “BFG” we split it up into thirds because it was a little longer. We aimed for our group to be reading around 100 pages per week.

In order to get the word out about book club as well as keep in touch

with our members we created a Facebook group called “PJ 1 Book Club” where we would post any news about the club and changes in times/meeting places. We also used this group to choose books using the poll option that Facebook offers which proved to be very useful. We also posted discussion questions here each week prior to our meetings to give the members an opportunity to familiarize themselves with what we would be discussing.

Attracting our members was something we knew was very important for the club to work so we decided on giving credit or points to those came.  Top marks went to those would had perfect attendance and partial credit went to those who only read one or two of the books. These marks were indeed real and coincided with the literacy class that we were in at the time. As well as points we encouraged snacks at our meetings and unsurprisingly everyone obliged.