Adams School Book Clubs

Last year’s solitary book club has now grown to four weekly groups spanning grades 3 to 8. Participants come down to the library to discuss a variety of student-selected books in different genres. Pairs of students are responsible for creating questions and leading the discussion each week.

Grade 3 Book Club is reading Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan this week. I am excited to see what thoughts and questions they will have about their book. I love historical fiction as it weaves storytelling and historic events together in an enjoyable and relatable way. Children are able to use the lessons to think about current events.

Grade 4 Book Club is starting Map of Flames by Lisa McCann.  Our previous book, Lifeboat 12  by Susan Hood, was based on a true story and took place during World War II. It was told from the perspective of Ken Sparks, a real survivor of the 1940 London Blitz and one of the children sent away from London to avoid the bombings. We learned some history and talked about how each of us would deal with being in Ken’s place.

Grades 5/6 Book Club are now on their second book entitled, The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani. It is a tale in which best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to discover where all the lost children go: the fabled School for Good and Evil, where ordinary boys and girls are trained to be fairy-tale heroes and villains. The students enjoyed the fantasy but felt that the author let them down as the book came to a close. The parody/play they chose to demonstrate their point was hilarious.  Our next book is a mystery that takes place in England entitled,The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd. 

Grades 7/8 Book Club is finishing I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys.  It is a powerful and gut wrenching novel about communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated that nation. We had little background knowledge and needed to build some of the historical blocks  but we all agreed that the writing made up for what we had to learn to understand the conflicts taking place in that part of the world. Books like this get you thinking about the current political climate.