Hey kids! It's another MotherTalk blog tour!*
School is nearly out, and parents everywhere are beginning to wonder what the heck to do with the summer looming before them. Here's an idea: Start a kids' book club. As it happens, I know just where to send you for information on how to do it. 
Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp have taken the concept from their first book, "The Book Club Cookbook," and gone nuts with it, creating what will probably always stand as the definitive book on organizing a kids' reading club. It covers the how-tos of starting a book club for children, ways to spice up meetings, and includes lists of suggested books for certain age groups.
Then they take these ideas and show you exactly what they're talking about, taking a suggested book and breaking it down for you. A timid book club organizer could take this book and work with it for a good chunk of time without having to come up with a single original idea. By the time he finished, he'd be a pro and wouldn't have any trouble continuing on his own.
Example: The break-down of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory":
- A brief synopsis of the book.
- A couple of pages of "tidbits" on author Roald Dahl, including biographical notes and a discussion of racism in the original depiction of the Oompa-Loompas.
- A recipe for Wonka's Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, a recipe created by Dahl himself with his wife, Felicity (with a warning that it's extremely sweet).
- A "candy inventing" activity.
- A candy bar guessing game.
- Discussion questions for the kids.
- Sadly, no ideas on how adults can cope with a book club full of kids hopped up on sugar. Luckily, it's a rare book that has this much candy in it!
Gelman and Levy Krupp interviewed something like 500 kids' book clubs around the country, and it shows. This book is PACKED with book ideas, activities, recipes, discussion questions and more. I can't imagine a homeschool group, especially, that wouldn't get a great deal out of it.
*What that means is, I got a free copy of the book and a $20 Amazon gift certificate for reviewing it, in full disclosure.
re you considering homeschooling your children? While there is more information out there about homeschooling than ever before, you may not know where to start. So let's take a look at homeschooling, from a beginner's perspective.
chool is nearly out, and parents everywhere are beginning to wonder what the heck to do with the summer looming before them. Here's an idea: Start a kids' book club. As it happens, I know just where to send you for information on how to do it. 
ike many middle-school-aged boys, my son despised writing assignments when we began homeschooling. Having been forced to do voluminous writing assignments when he was still attending school, his initial reaction when I became his teacher was to protest and argue over every writing assignment I gave him. After much trial and error, I found that the best approach was to give him a lot of latitude in choosing the topics and even what days he would write, at least in the beginning. When months began to pass and his writing skills were still weaker than I thought they should be for someone his age and given his abilities in other academic areas, I decided I had to induce him to practice writing more but also had to make it fun. If I didn't, we were going to have struggles over every sentence that ever reached the paper.
ur family mixes community volunteering and homeschooling into our daily lives. Volunteering with children began early in our family. While pregnant with my first child, we were weekly volunteers at the local genealogy society. After my daughter's birth we continued to help other families find their ancestral roots. I have a wonderful picture of her in a chest pack, while I shared genealogical information with people at the county fair. My children and my community volunteering were two priorities that I found a way to combine. 
