Falk Family Book Club
by Emma Kagan
Back in spring 2025, my co-librarian at Falk School, Benoni Outerbridge, and I dreamed up ways to increase reading joy and engagement in our community. An idea sparked to create a family book club event, and we got really excited about the possibilities. We were particularly interested in creating an event for Primary students (K-2), since we already engage over 100 Intermediate and Middle school students each year through the WPCTE English Festival program. We applied for an internal grant through our school administration and were awarded funding. The total cost of the event, including books, food and materials came to about $500. After lots of brainstorming, planning, and collaborating with our fabulous colleagues, the event came to life on Wednesday, November 5.The book we chose to read for our inaugural family book club was Oh, Sal by Kevin Henkes. Oh, Sal is a relatively short chapter book about a young girl named Sal and her family. It is a cozy, humorous book that takes place around the winter holiday season. Sal has a new baby sister at home and is adjusting to life as an older sibling. She also mysteriously loses her favorite Christmas gift, a pair of floral underpants! We picked Oh, Sal because we wanted a book that students had likely not read before and was a book not all students might gravitate towards on their own. Part of our grant funding allowed the 45 families that registered for the event to receive a free copy of the book. If you want to do this type of event, but do not have funding for books you could also encourage families to get a copy of the book from the public library. We sent the book home with a bookmark that contained guided discussion questions and a reminder of the book club event date.
Families had about a month to read on their own before the evening book club event. Meanwhile, we assembled a team of teachers that wanted to be involved in planning the event. Since the event was geared towards Kindergarten, first and second grade we decided to move away from a more traditional discussion focused book club and instead create activities related to the book.
We chose to hold the event from 6:00 - 7:30pm and had a complimentary pizza dinner to kick off the evening. During dinner we put our discussion questions on cafeteria tables to encourage families to make connections and chat about the book. Following dinner, students rotated through three activities - art, music, and trivia. Students had 20 minutes to enjoy each activity (see attached image for the full schedule). In the art activity students made a beaded necklace craft inspired by a necklace Sal wears in the book. The music activity had students signing and moving to flower songs (Sal’s floral underpants are a big part of the plot!). Finally, for trivia we used Mentimeter, an interactive online resource that helped us ask a variety of open and closed-ended questions. Parents were able to join the mentimeter on their phones (we had a few extra iPads if needed) and play with their children.
The night of the event we saw so many smiles and students happy to be participating in their very first book club! Since the event we have gotten many requests for another book club event. Our current plan is to have a third grade family book club event in the spring and another event for primary students and families in the fall of 2026. I would highly encourage other teachers to think about planning a book club event for students and their families. One piece of advice is to work with other teachers so you can share the work of planning and facilitating the event.
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