In short, I am busy: Fact Finders

 The audience for this book club is independent readers, from roughly kindergarten to middle school, who love nonfiction. Even if they don't think they do, they can still enjoy sharing the things they know or learn and working on projects together. I scheduled it a little later, 5pm, and am thinking about potentially having it at 6pm for working parents, but then I'll run into athletics, so I'm still thinking about that.

At the first meeting, I gave the kids a notebook with some initial handouts, including an overview of the Dewey system, the 5 types of nonfiction, and questions to ask while reading nonfiction. We discussed how Dewey works and what our favorite topics were that we'd like to learn about. No surprise, animals were the top choice!

Resources and files are here.

For the first meeting, I had pre-selected our topic - marsupials. I had a range of books from picture books to early readers to chapter books and different types of nonfiction. I booktalked them while they colored their folders and then they each chose a selection of books. There was also a starter handout with questions and suggestions of facts to look for.

I only had two kids at the first meeting, but I saved materials for a couple other interested families/kids and had them available at Bookaneers as well.