The Reviews Are In

“It’s book club, tonight!  It’s book club, tonight!”

Their excitement could not be contained.  Ezra kept checking in to make sure I had all of the activities planned.  And Zach kept spontaneously hugging me throughout the day, thanking me for hosting book group at our house.  Of course, his gratefulness would have been easier to understand if he’d ever been to a book club.

I don’t know if it was the idea of being in club that so excited them.  Or maybe it was that the format of our newly-formed club is an hour of playing and eating before getting to the book.  Or maybe it was just that other home-schooled kids were coming to our house. But something about the book club captured the boys’ imagination.

We read Babe, The Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith.  It was a surprisingly hard read, with difficult vocabulary and a cultural context we do not share.  Normally, I might have had a hard time getting them to finish it.  But each day, they would announce, “Mom, we only have 12 days left and we still have 9 chapters to go.  Can we PLEASE read Babe?”

At points the boys were jumping up and down on the couch with excitement, falling on the floor laughing, and yelling, “I knew it!” or “Noooooo!” They loved this sweet book.  We all did.

As the club host, it was my job to come up with activities.  I’ll share them briefly in case you want to try some of them at home.

1.  I gave each kid a sheet to fill in with the author’s name, a list of other book’s he had written, and some facts about his life.  (Not surprisingly, Dick was a farmer and schoolteacher before becoming a writer.)

2. I filled a bowl with 15 slips of paper.  Each kid pulled out a slip and gave as many verbal clues as needed for the other kids to guess the character or phrase from the book.  Next, we put all of the slips back in the bowl.  In round two, when they pulled out a slip, they had to act it out with no words.

3.  I made 6 piles of questions: 1 – Fill In the Blank; 2 – Book-to-Book; 3 – Book-to-Life; 4 – Book Review; 5 – Book Review; 6 – Make Up A Question.  When it was your turn, you rolled a dice and read the question.  Then you could decide whether to answer it yourself or make everyone else answer it.  There was something about rolling a dice that convinced them they were playing a game.  They monitored themselves, answering questions and talking about the book, for 20 minutes.

A book review question: “If you were rewriting the book, what would you change?” To which Zach said, “I would make Babe into a cheetah.”

A book-to-life question: “Babe had to work really hard to learn how to do something that did not come naturally to him.  Have you ever had to work really hard to do something that wasn’t easy for you?” To which Ezra said, “I have to work hard not to be mean.”

The final review came in via email later that night.  One mother said that on their way home, her son raved, “I thought book group was just talking about books, not playing games about books!”

Next month, we’re reading The Peterkin Papers. I’ll let you know when the reviews come in.