 Hi everyone, my name is Steph, this is Little Bookish Teacher and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today I'm here to talk about short books that you can use for junior book clubs in primary school. So the idea from this came from a discussion I had with some colleagues earlier last year and we were talking about literature circles and traditionally literature circles have been used in middle and upper primary and early secondary as a way of students discussing longer texts. Our discussion really centered around how actually book clubs, literature circles slash book clubs, that's just another name for them, can actually be very successfully implemented in junior classrooms from kindergarten, year one, year two, etc. And it's just about choosing different texts, texts that students are interested in would be engaging for them and setting up the routines and expectations for them. So for anyone who's unfamiliar, literature circles traditionally came about by having a book that students would discuss and students would have different roles and would talk about the text from the lens of their different roles. Now those roles were initially created to help students understand how to have a conversation about a book, they were never meant to be hard and fast rules for what you had to talk about while in a literature circle. One of the things about teachers is when someone tells us, oh, this is a way that you could do it. We tend to stick with it because it's usually something that works. However, my philosophy with literature circles has always been to yes, teach the roles as a way of giving students a structure and a framework to think about the book, but you have to pull those roles back pretty quickly so that they know that they can actually access multiple of those roles anytime they're reading a book, because that's what we do as confident, capable independent readers as adults. We're always looking at the book through multiple lenses all the time and thinking about it in lots of different ways. So anyway, our conversation around book clubs in the junior grades came down to well, we need to actually find some really good short texts that we could use because literature circles usually run over a couple of weeks. In a junior classroom, you don't really have the luxury of running a four, five, six-week-long literature circle because that's just too long for a younger student. Those students are usually able to hold a story for a little bit longer, so they can manage it if you need to, which prompted me to go out and find some short novels. Now, I will also preface this by saying literature circles or book clubs do not necessarily need to be a novel. It can be a poem. It can be a short story. It can be anything that you want to talk about and that you can draw ideas out of and have a really rich discussion about the text with. For the purposes of this, I've gone on with some shorter novels and these actually range from short texts that would be fantastic in kindergarten grade one, grade two, as well as some books that would be fantastic in the upper years but are much shorter texts. So that would be great for those students who really struggle with much longer books. So we're going to start off with two that would be absolutely perfect for junior grades. The first one is Fairybred by Ursula Dupasarski and illustrated by Mitch Bain. This is part of the Puff and Nibbles series here in Australia and to be honest, any book in this series would work perfectly for a K-12 book club because even though they're novels, they have very large texts. They do still have chapters, so students feel like they're reading a chapter book but the story is much shorter and they often deal with contemporary situations that students might find themselves in. In this case, our main character, it's her birthday. She wants to have Fairybred for her birthday party and she and her mum make piles and piles of Fairybred that doesn't get eaten and then she has to figure out what to do with all of the Fairybred because she doesn't want to just throw it away. So there's a lot of scope in here for students to make connections, to talk about the characters, to talk about what they think might be happening in the story, what might happen next. The ending is also really great because there is an implied ending so you would actually have to talk about well, what do you think actually happened, which is amazing. Another short text, this one has slightly more text in it, is Born to Sing by Sally Morgan and illustrated by Craig Smith. This book I found in my school's library and I absolutely loved it. It's very, very short. Again, the text is a bit smaller in this one, so probably grade one, grade two, this would be perfect for them and this is about Maddie who loves to sing and she and her family end up going on a trip to see the whales because she's absolutely obsessed with whales along the coastline and along the way she becomes really worried that she's not going to get to see the whales so there is a little bit of suspense building around that and it opens up lots of conversations about family holidays, about being worried that you might miss out on something, things that those students can connect with. So I really love these kinds of options for younger readable clubs. In a similar vein is the Our Stories series. This is a collection of own voices stories that look at different cultures, different groups within communities, and their stories. So there is The Very Best Donut by Randall Adel Fattah. This one is about a young boy who is trying to fast for Ramadan for the first time. There is When Granny Came to Stay by Alice Peng, which is about a young boy whose Chinese grandmother comes to stay with them and she does things just a little bit differently and he's trying to reconcile that with all of the fancy new things that he wants. There is Marku by Main White. This is an indigenous story and this one follows a boy who wants to write the first Aboriginal superhero and then 29 Things You Didn't Know About Me by Sully Raphael. And this one is about making friends and being worried that you're not going to have things in common, particularly when you're having your first sleepover. These are short, they're great, they're diverse, they have an incredible cast of writers and I'm kind of hoping we get some more books in this series this year because I've really loved them. And also these ones do have quite large text as well. So these would be perfect for grade one, grade two, grade three. And then two books that sort of move more into that middle and upper primary category. There is Uncle Xbox by Jared Thomas. This one is an Australian First Nations story. It's about Dusty whose stepdad ends up moving out and takes away the Xbox that Dusty loves playing on. But then Dusty's Uncle Rick comes back into town and starts to teach Dusty how to surf. And it is about Dusty learning that it's okay not to have the video game console, that there are other things that he can do, which is rather topical for kids these days. But it's not preachy about it at all. It's about Dusty discovering new hobbies and finding things that he really loves, even when he thought he couldn't survive without one of his favorite things. And then finally there is Sea Glass by Rebecca Fraser. This one is about Kaelin who ends up staying with a grandfather. She doesn't really know very well while her mother is working a nursing job in a small coastal town. Kaelin and her grandfather bond over hunting for Sea Glass along the coastline. But of course Kaelin is there over school holidays and she's feeling like she's far away from her friends. She doesn't have the things that she absolutely loves and was planning on doing in the holidays. And so it takes a little while for her to come to groups with that and she's not always really nice to her grandfather and she's forced to realize that our words have power. I will say in this one just be aware that there is a character who ends up in hospital from a heart attack so be aware of that because that may be triggering for some students. So that's just a little collection of short books for book clubs in classrooms. Hopefully that is helpful to people. I'm looking forward to running some book clubs this year and I will keep you guys informed as to how that goes. We will probably start off with short stories and poetry just to get a sense of how we can actually build up stamina for longer book clubs. But you know some of these will definitely feature in them if we get a chance. If you've read any of these books I would love to hear your thoughts on them or if you have suggestions for other short junior fiction or middle fiction titles that would make for great book club books for students for free to leave them down below. And by short they're referring to like a hundred pages or less because a hundred pages is still long for kids. 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