Teacher Book Club

Tonight, our staff participated in their first teacher book club! My friend Lisa and I started talking this fall about some new professional books.  We were getting all excited and giddy while we were talking about them and we both had the same idea at the same time..."What if we started a teacher book club?" 
Why not? 
So we did! 
We chose the book "Reading in the Wild" by Donalyn Miller and organized our first book club!

We had about 17 teachers participate this first time and we are hoping to follow this book up with another book! It was great to get together, eat food and have drinks, and talk about things that we don't usually have time to talk about in school! It's important to use each other as resources because each teacher has so much to add and we can learn so much from each other. 

We were able to talk about building a culture of wild readers.
We were able to talk about how important it is to read books that the kids read so that you are familiar with them and can talk about them with kids.
We were able to talk about the importance of having students have independent reading time EVERYDAY!
We were able to talk about the importance of read aloud and how that can build community in the classroom. 
We were able to discuss the idea of leveling books and giving students a level that they identify with as a reader. We talked about the pros and cons of this and how it is different at each grade level. 
We were able to talk about conferring with readers and how often we should do this and if it looks the same for every student in our class.
We were able to talk about posting our read aloud outside of our classroom and creating "buzz" about books in our school.
We were able to talk about the point that our "avid, voracious readers" are our worst record keepers and how do we navigate that. Do we have to worry about this or just let it be?
We were able to talk about reading logs and their purpose.
We were able to talk about how choice matters when it comes to reading.
We were able to collaborate.
We were able to reaffirm what we do in our reading blocks. 
We were able to laugh.

Excited to start a new book and find time to do this again!