feature story
The Altogether Book Club for Children and Parents Family collaboration isn’t as easy as the ABCs, but one district found success by engaging families with books. BY MELINDA B. FALCONI, M.ED. The Altogether Book Club (ABC) in Olmsted Falls was designed to foster the home/school/community and parent/child partnerships that are vital for children’s success in school. ABC grew out of a collaboration between the Olmsted Falls Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library and the Olmsted Falls Early Childhood Center (ECC), the preschool and kindergarten building of the Olmsted Falls City School District. Not content to limit our activities to then Children’s Librarian Michelle Todd’s involvement in the ECC’s Family Literacy Night and Right To Read Week activities and our students’ field trips to the library, I pitched an idea to Michelle that I’d been contemplating for a long time: a parent/child book club.
In the six years since its inception, the logistics and format of the ABC have settled into a comfortable and successful place. The 20182019 session was full with 12 adult/child dyads. All 8 meetings, which are held monthly from October through May from 7:00 - 8:00 PM on Thursdays at the library, were well-attended in spite of the winter’s inclement weather.
The dream of a book club in which parents (or grandparents) and their young children are equal participants was inspired by several issues that concerned me in my role as the administrator of a school in which learning to listen, speak, read, and write is a major focus: • A lack of challenging programming in our preschool/ kindergarten building to meet the needs of early readers • The discomfort of some parents, even those who are avid readers themselves, with knowing how to share books, especially nonfiction books (to which many young children are particularly drawn) with their children • The misguided thinking of some parents that children who are able to read no longer need to be read to and have outgrown beautifully written and thematically rich picture books • Finally, the community debate surrounding the Common Core State Standards that was becoming increasingly contentious at that time illuminated the need for parent education about the district’s English/ Language Arts curriculum.
Planning for ABC begins in August, when Sue and I meet to choose the books for the year. Keeping in mind the kindergarten ELA standards we hope to teach throughout the session, we choose a variety of books, including one: • in which the illustrations are integral to understanding the story (The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting) • that is useful for a study of character development (Mother Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins) • that is rich in unfamiliar vocabulary that could be used to practice techniques for determining the meaning of unknown words (Elizabeth, Queen of the Seas by Lynne Cox) • that is historical and lends itself to the use of a timeline (Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine) • that involves some scientific phenomenon or the scientific method (Ice Boy by David Ezra Stein or Charlotte the Scientist is Squished by Camille Andros) • nonfiction book that includes a variety of text features (Meerkats, National Geographic Kids Super Readers: Level 1)
A couple of years into the project, Sue Grame, the current children’s librarian, replaced Michelle Todd at the Olmsted Falls Branch. With her, Sue brought a wealth of experience planning family programming.
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