Amber O’Neal Johnston | June 15, 2022
One of the homeschool activities I’m asked about most is our Heritage Book Club. It’s an off-shoot of the local support group I run for black homeschooled children and their families, and it’s one of our most popular activities. We don’t limit the children to one type of book, but most of the selections feature Black authors and/or characters. We designed the book club to bathe our children in cultural mirrors that they don’t often find in other literary environments, and since launching our culturally-rich book club the children have read over 100 books! I can’t help but smile as I write this.
The goals of Heritage Book Club are to:
Our homeschool support group started in 2016, and the book club launched the following year. Since then, we’ve had various age/grade breakdowns to best meet the needs of our membership, but this is what things look like this year:
Book club is NOT school, and the children do not have to maximize their potential reading levels. It is a fun activity, with friends, focused on one book a month. When making placement decisions, we ask parents to consider their child’s social needs, maturity, and the subject matter of certain books in addition to reading levels.
Meeting Format (1 hour):
10 min | Group check-in with ice-breaker question or general conversation |
25 – 35 min | Child-led book discussion facilitated by child/parent team (rotated monthly)* |
15 – 25 min | Snack, craft, game, or activity based on the book |
*Exception: While meeting on Zoom during COVID-19, the groups are fully led by parent volunteers because it is difficult for the students to lead engaging meetings virtually. As often as possible, students will have opportunities for leadership roles during meetings.
Here are my notes from a recent meeting if you’d like to see an example of how to run a book club meeting. Normally, we’d have one or more hands-on activities because we typically meet in person (with the various age-based groups meeting simultaneously in different rooms), but all of our book club groups are meeting via Zoom for now.
Ground Rules (Parents are asked to review these with each child):
General Guidelines (provided to parents):
Book Selection Guidelines: We’ve read a ton of books in the past several years .They range from light-hearted and fun to intense and emotional. Some years, the children get on a roll with a certain type of book and other times the selections are all over the map.
Here is a list of our past culturally-rich book club selections. I will be updating this monthly with our current selections, and I’m also still adding in past books.
If you’d like to download a copy of all of this info in a single document, here is what I distribute to interested and participating parents each year: Heritage Homeschoolers Book Club Info Sheet. It’s locked so you won’t be able to make changes to the master file, but you can download the file and make as many edits as you’d like to your personal file.
You can reach me on Instagram @heritagemomblog.
ox - Amber O’Neal Johnston
Author and Mother
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