Book Group, Revised

We just had a planning meeting for next year's book group. Some things will stay the same -- still a great bunch of kids, still aiming for some meaty discussions. But one big thing is changing and I think it can be an excellent new direction for our discussions. There's nothing wrong with our old way, in fact I think we're only building on that background.

A little history:

The first year we had a book group, the kids were around 7 years old and we used the Junior Great Books program. It's an excellent program, and almost (almost!) "open and go" for the facilitator. The kids had to read short stories with specific questions and themes to look for, and the discussion was structured in such a way as to teach them that nothing in a well-written story is really random, and also that there were many different ways of seeing the same work. The kids' ability to participate in a discussion improved tremendously from the beginning of the year to the end, and their grasp of the subtleties of literature did as well. It was an excellent beginning, and the effects of that starting place are still obvious, three years later.

The second and third years we expanded the group, added more older kids (starting with the older siblings of the original set), split it into two groups by age (8-10 and 10-12, more or less), and moved on to whole, full-length books. A lot of what was good about the Junior Great Books model was applied to the new approach. Those two years are outlined in my other literature post, but the major idea was that every kid read the same book as every other kid in that group, and could discuss the finer points of the writing and use of themes.

This year is different. Instead of specific books, we're planning themes. In some cases that's a fairly specific story as approached by different authors - like our September theme of Troy. (The Iliad, the Aeneid, the Odyssey, and any derivative works). In other cases it's a genre - Victorian Farce - or a major theme - Hard Times. One of the reasons for this change is that we want to see the kids take a more active role in their discussions. As much as the previous years were excellent for the sort of discussion we were looking for, this year we're hoping the kids will be able to share books that their fellow group members haven't read. It's a different sort of sharing than we've done before and requires that the kids take a more active role. This approach also gets into a different kind of discussion. Instead of themes, conflict, beautiful phrasing and imagery (although those will certainly come into it), the discussions can be mostly aimed toward comparing and contrasting the different approaches that authors can take when on common ground.

The thematic approach also adapts well to the range of kids we now have. The two groups of last year are now four. The oldest kids are 11-13, the "middle" kids (including the original group) are mostly 10, and we have two younger groups - one of 8-9 year olds and one of 6-7s. We'd really like some overlap in their experience, but there's no way to pick a book that can challenge 13 year olds and find an audience with six year olds. Themes, however, can be done more broadly, and allowing the kids a choice of books within that theme gives them more flexibility to challenge themselves (but not be overwhelmed) both regarding the length of what they're reading and the content.

So taking the theme of Hard Times as an example (since I'll be facilitating one group for that), Dickens is an obvious choice for the older kids, or many of the books set in the Great Depression. Younger kids could do a shorter Dickens, or maybe find a book about any kind of general hardship - poverty, war, personal or family difficulties. Lots of possibilities there. And really no matter what they choose, comparisons can be made:

• What is "hard" about the hard times? Is everyone suffering or just a few?
• How are the hard times explained? Are they someone's fault? Just the nature of the world? Something to fix? Something to endure?
• How do the characters react to their situation? Do their hardships consume them? do the characters grow/ mature because of their hardships?
• How does the author portray suffering? Is patience a virtue? Or struggling to overcome obstacles?
• Who changes (grows) in the story and what makes them change?

These all get to the general ideas of setting, conflict, character, growth and change, and the plot curve, all of which were major discussion points in our last two years. Introducing the extra complication of more than one book will be something more to juggle, but well-managed I think it will add a great deal to the depth of our discussions.

Our themes for this year:

• Troy (Iliad, Aeneid, Odyssey)
• Biographies
• Hard Times
• Identity/ Self-awareness
• Victorian Comic Plays/ Farce
• Mysteries of History
• Nature