Teen Book Club Activity

I’ve been running the Teen Book Club at my library for four years now, and I have a consistent group of 40 teens who are signed up for TBC. I only get about half of them to show up every meeting, but that’s teen life for you — they are so busy nowadays. (And I’m sounding *old* saying that.)

Anyways, I think my TBC is very successful. I structure it so that no one is left out of a meeting, even if they don’t have time to finish the book that month.

For the first thirty minutes, we talk about the book club pick. And then for the second thirty minutes, it’s free-share time for them to booktalk whatever else they’ve been reading to their peers. Of course, I’m already prepped to go if I get a quieter bunch of teens at one meeting.

Three months ago, during the discussion for “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks,” my teens were describing Frankie and asked if I could display their words in the teen section. After a bit of brainstorming, they came up with the idea of making it into a bookmark that I could put inside of the library’s copy of the book to sell the book and publicize TBC.

Frankie's Bookmark

We’ve since done a bookmark for Jennifer Brown’s “Hate List” and this month we read the third book in The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod series by Heather Brewer.

Here’s what the teens came up with:

(I just took a screenshot of the Publisher file…hence the spell-check underline under Vlad’s name.)

My teen girls wanted hot, sexy, and “my new boyfriend” on the list. Just so you know. The boys vetoed sexy and my new boyfriend, but allowed hot to stay on the list.

I really love this tradition, and the bookmarks keep getting taken out of the books. I probably replace bookmarks once a week when copies are actually on the shelf, that is.

Do you guys do any special activities with your book clubs?

10 comments

  1. Hi! My name is Chloe and I resently started a book club at my school with peers of mine. Our English teacher is the adult who is watching us. Since it is only our first of having book club we are trying to find good books to read with a good message behind them or some that will appeal to our teen brow point. I would really like to have some pointers on how to handle everything. It would be a lot of help!

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