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.

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.

In the six years since its inception, the logistics and format of the ABC have settled into a comfortable and successful place. The 2018- 2019 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.

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.

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)

The ABC is “advertised” in the Library’s Calendar of Events, available online and in hard copy format, and it is open to preschoolers and kindergartners who do not attend the ECC. In addition, personal invitations are sent to ECC teacher-recommended early readers as well as families who have expressed an interest in fostering reading at home and are searching for activities in which they can participate with their children. Session One serves to introduce the Club members and state our objectives—Sue’s and mine, as well as each participant’s. The format of the book discussion itself sets the stage for the subsequent six meetings:

• Identifying the book’s title, author, and illustrator. • Noticing other “points of interest” that are contained in the parts of the book some people don’t bother to read, for example, the dedication, appendix, or author bio. (I confess to the ABC members that I am a “book geek” who reads every single word of our books, including what kind of paper they were printed on.) • Discussing the actual book itself, highlighting a particular ELA standard or topic for which the book was chosen. For example, the “lesson” for the first meeting involves the use of visualization while reading and ties to the importance of illustrations to the process of connecting to and understanding a story. For the past couple of years, we’ve opened the year’s session by reading A Moon of My Own by Jennifer Rustgi, illustrated by Ashley White. • Sharing our thoughts and opinions about the book and the experience of reading it. Sue and I teach the participants how to “Think, Pair, Share.” ABC members are encouraged to verbalize their opinions and return to the text to share their “evidence,” understanding that much of what we think we learned from a piece of fiction was read “between the lines” and in the illustrations (It is important that parents understand that “just looking at the pictures” is an early step in literacy learning). We explain that oftentimes in discussions about good literature, there is no “right” answer, more than one “right” answer or, sometimes, no answer at all. • Participating as adult/child partnerships to complete a craft or some kind of task. For A Moon of My Own, each dyad is given Oreo cookies and asked to separate each and alter the icing to create the phases of the moon as pictured in the book’s appendix. At the close of each session, Sue invites the ABC members to peruse the books that she’s gathered on the same topic as the evening’s selection (for example, astronomy and space travel) and introduces the book that we will read together for our next meeting. She works closely with the Circulation Department to gather enough copies of each selection and to allow ABC members to borrow books for four weeks instead of the usual three. The final session of the school year culminates in a special project that is inspired by the final selection the ABC reads together. For example, in the May meeting of the 2017-2018 ABC, each participant designed and painted an 8x8 inch tile to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the ECC. The tiles were installed on the wall at the ECC that is directly across from the library, appropriately enough. The project was inspired by Theresa Howell’s Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood.

During this year’s last session, we read and discussed Prickly Hedgehogs by Jane McGuinness. Afterward, we met a live hedgehog and asked questions of her owner, and each dyad wrote and illustrated a fictional story about a hedgehog that they presented to the other ABC members and Lindsay Ward, the children’s author/ illustrator of It’s Show and Tell, Dexter! Sue and I invited Lindsay to visit during our final ABC meeting to describe the process of creating a book from start to finish. This was in response to a personal objective of one of our ABC members who wanted to learn “how we get books.” The ABC has received a great deal of positive feedback from Sue’s colleagues and superiors in the Cuyahoga County Public Library. It was featured in Mary Schreiber’s Partnering with Parents: Boosting Literacy for All Ages. However, the most important accolades are those we receive, both formally and informally, from ABC members themselves over the course of the year and on a survey that is administered at the last meeting. One success story was self-reported by Tommy, one of the kindergartners at the ECC, whose mother signed them up because Tommy adamantly told her that he didn’t want to learn how to read. When asked after our last session together how he felt about reading now that ABC was over, he admitted that he liked reading “a little bit.” Mission accomplished. Melinda B. Falconi, M.Ed., principal of the Olmsted Falls Early Childhood Center for eight years, has been a special educator for 40 years. Twenty-five of those years have been spent in early childhood education, where she has sought out opportunities for community collaboration and parent education. One of Falconi’s greatest joys is celebrating children’s development with their caregivers and teachers. Her current crusade is mobilizing the village to help promote children’s mental health at home, at school, and in the community. The author can be reached via email at Melindabee3456@gmail.com. “The dream of a book club in which families and their young children are equal participants was inspired by several issues that concerned me in my role as the administrator of a school.”

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A Year in the Altogether Book Club

1. Sue and the kids launch their rockets after discussing Camille Andros’ Charlotte the Scientist is Squished. 2. The Altogether Book Club, a collaborative community of readers and writers. 3. Book club dyads collaborate to create the phases of the moon from Oreos after our discussion of A Moon of My Own by Jennifer Rustgi. 4. Kindergartner and his mom reading their hedgehog adventure to book club. 5. Club members create a mural together after discussing Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood by F. Isabel Campoy and Theresa Howell. 6. Sue demonstrates the construction of a meerkat following our discussion about a fiction and a nonfiction book about meerkats. 7. Club members paint like Kandinsky after discussing Barb Rosenstock’s The Noisy Paintbox.

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