As librarians, we all have things at which we excel, and things that make others say, “Well, bless their heart, they tried!” For me, my kryptonite is book clubs. Over the decades I’ve been a school librarian, I’ve run many book clubs in many formats, with only intermittent success. What I’ve finally settled on, though, is a monthly, no-commitment lunchtime session, in which students who love reading can talk about books while they eat their lunches. We also eat cookies, trade recommendations, and I pass around a box of sixty-plus questions for when the discussion lags.
We always start our meetings with a brief, brain-warm-up activity that I’ve either devised or borrowed. Most of the time, students have to solve a puzzle of some kind to “earn” the cookies I bring to club, but sometimes we play a game or do a craft instead. Below is a list of as many of my activities as I can remember—please feel free to try them out!
Crafts
Crafts that don’t require a lot of prep or a lot of time to complete are best for book club openers. I advise against anything that needs glue!
- Author’s Crafts—If you are reading a specific book, sometimes you can find activities on the author’s website, such as Keeper of the Lost cities “stickers” we turned into buttons.
- Coloring Pages—Find coloring pages related to the book you are reading, such as dragons for a Wings of Fire book.
- Button Quotes—Print out reading and writing quotes in fancy fonts for button-making, or have students write the quotes out themselves with art supplies (or both!).
- Gift Boxes—Turn old greeting cards or book covers printed on cardstock into small gift boxes.
Codes/Clues
If you have some basic locks and boxes, you can create an endless number of clues to lead students to the solution, whether it’s a series of clues or a single one. Here are a few that I have tried.
- Haikus—I created a series of haiku puzzles to solve related to The Trials of Apollo, including music notes to translate to letters that create words, Bananagrams tiles to rearrange, and a song to play from a flash drive.
- Rebus Puzzles—Endlessly useful! Sometimes I’ll do a rebus that leads to a key, sometimes I’ll do a chapter title or book title rebus to solve, etc.
- Invisible Ink—Always a favorite. Often this forms part of a two step puzzle; the first puzzle leads them to a locked box with a blacklight, and they use the blacklight to read the final clue—usually, where to find the cookies.
- Foreign Languages—Clues that include foreign languages. For instance, when we read The Lightning Thief, I created a clue with key words written in Greek letters.
- Book-Specific Clues—Clues akin to puzzles or incidents in the book you’re reading. For instance, when we read The City of Ember, I wrote the clue on paper that I crumpled and ripped up; the students had to put it back together to read it.
- Directional Clues—For instance, I found book titles that had a direction in them (north, south, up, down, etc.), and wrote out clues to help students find those titles in our catalog. The direction in each title told the students how to solve a directional lock. You could also use a map from a book with a narrative describing a journey in various directions.
- Book-Title Clues—I borrowed this idea from a friend: I gave students a grid of twelve books, with one book numbered to show them how to count. The code to the letters in the clue sentence were three digits in sequence, joined by dash marks. The first letter indicates which book, the second letter indicates which word in the title, and the third indicates which letter in that word.
- Word-Puzzle Clues—For example, I wrote sentences in which some letters at the end of the first word combined with letters at the start of the second word spelled a number to help open a number lock. A sample sentence might start: “Teachers ix-nayed…” and the rest of the sentence is a red herring. Note: This one was really hard—too hard without lots of hints!
Matching Games
These are fairly quick and easy to put together.
- First Line/Last Line—Match first or last lines of books to the appropriate title.
- International Covers—Match international covers for same book with the nationality of their publication.
- Globe-Trotting Covers—Match ten books set in different countries with the country in which they take place.
- Teacher Childhood Favorites—Match faculty childhood photos with their favorite childhood book; this obviously requires some faculty participation!
- Book Summaries—Match covers of new books to their summaries.
Writing Activities
The story-writing activities run a bit longer than I would usually allow for a starting activity; I mostly used these first two with club iterations that only shared a glancing relationship with books (writing, book games, literary smackdowns, etc.).
- Write-a-Line Stories—Write the first two lines of a story or choose two lines from a book, then fold the page down so only the second line shows. (You could also create small booklets and write a sentence per sheet and fold it back, as folding a letter-sized page over and over gets hard!) The next person sees the second line or book sentence, and either writes the next two lines based on that, or finds two lines from a different book that could continue the story. Repeat until you run out of paper, and read the story aloud!
- Round Robin Stories—Start a story, and pass it along to the next person to continue.
- Review Haiku—Write reviews of books in haiku form.
- Post-it Reviews—Create a post-it sized form with room for some stars, author and title, and a small space to write why someone should read this book. Display those books in the library, along with the recommendation. Borrowed idea from (I think) Travis Jonker.
Book Games—General
Some of these games take longer than others; play them just as long as they hold students’ interest!
- Book Title Balderdash—Pick titles of several new books that won’t be familiar to the students. They will all write fake summaries, hoping to fool the other players when all of the summaries are read aloud, including the real one. This can be played with a Balderdash game board, or just for fun without counting points.
- Book Title Pictionary—Pretty self-explanatory. Can be played in teams or as a group.
- Book Title Telestrations—Based on the Telestrations game. A student takes a book title or character, and tries to draw it well enough for the second student to guess. That student writes down their guess and passes it on, without the drawing. The next student has to draw something based on that guess, and so it goes.
- Name that book—Inspired by Name That Tune. Students “bet” on how many words from the first sentence(s) it will take for them to name a book, omitting identifying words like names. The kids found this one pretty hard, so adding a genre or using the summary instead of the first line(s) might help.
- Trivia/Jeopardy—This takes a lot of time to put together, so would be for a special event, probably when you are all reading the same book. Alternately, if, like me, you have several hundred Battle of the Books questions hanging around, you could grab a few from the most popular books and just have at it.
- Names in a Hat—In this game, everyone writes down a book title or character and throws it in an ersatz “hat.” On the first round, the person who is “it” draws one slip after the other, and can say anything (except what’s on the slip) to get the other players to guess what it is. They have one minute to get through as many as they can. At the end of round one, all the slips go back in the hat. For round two, the active player draws the slips again, but can say only one word to try to get the other players to guess the answer. For round three, they can only charade it.
Book Title Games
In these games, students must figure out book titles or words in book titles from the clues given.
- Food Titles—Find clip art of food found in titles, and students use the catalog to find title(s) including that food. This could also work with other things, like animals, plants, etc.
- Changed Titles—Give a description of books that would result if one word were removed from the real title/series title, and a hint. Students must identify the real title. Example: __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Ben Ripley attends an academy that focuses on being agile and flexible. (Series title, one letter added)
- Emoji Titles—You can devise these yourself, or you can find some online. Line up some emojis that represent a popular book title. It can be straightforward, or use homonyms (like a peace sign representing the word “piece”). Here are the ones I used:
I love games and codes and crafts, so it’s always fun to come up with or hear about new, short activities I can use to combat my book-club kryptonite! I hope some of these prove useful to you.
