Matt Renwick's Top Ten Takeaways from The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin, 2013)
This is a post I wrote for the Nerdy Book Club last week. It highlights important information from The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. My parent group and some staff will be hosting a book club around this resource.
I have been asked a number of times how our parent-teacher book club will go. To start, we received a local grant to purchase several copies of the Read Aloud Handbook along with many of the titles Jim Trelease recommends. Every first Tuesday of the month, we will facilitate a conversation about this resource. Our group will gather during our monthly PTO meeting. I plan to moderate the conversation with questions from the two chapters we read before the meeting. I will also post the questions on Twitter using the #ptchat hashtag so anyone can join us from home. Parents who attend will get to take home different titles to read aloud to their kids. At the next book club meeting, they can bring back those titles and exchange them with other parents for new ones. We hope this dialogue about books and the benefits of reading aloud will extend beyond our monthly gatherings.
Once our book club has ended, we will put these titles into Little Free Libraries in the area (also grant-funded). They will be installed in our surrounding school community. Families will have more access to books regardless of their current living situation or available resources.
Please join us every first Tuesday of the month at 5:30 CST on Twitter at #ptchat to engage in some great conversations! (Special note: School was cancelled tomorrow, so there will not be a chat on January 7. Stay tuned for when the January chat will be rescheduled.)