Book club kits give teachers, homeschoolers flexibility
Elkhart Public Library now offers book club kits to keep learning accessible for teachers and homeschoolers.
The kits are available to place a hold on in the library’s online catalog and can be picked up at any library location. Each bag includes 12 copies of the book and may be checked out for 90 days.
“The service is important for the library to provide because when reading is a social experience, kids are more likely to enjoy reading,” says Allison McLean, head of the children’s department. “One of the best ways to do that is for everyone to read the same book. That requires a lot of copies of books.”
Allison says the idea came after a teacher asked to get books for a book club. Instead of making teachers wait for books to come through interlibrary loan, EPL can have a dozen books available at once. The book-only kits give teachers the freedom and flexibility to build their own lesson plans or discussion guides.
Currently, EPL has the below titles across adult, juvenile fiction, and young adult fiction genres available as book club kits.
Juvenile fiction
“Restart” by Gordon Korman
“Long Way Down” by Jason Reynolds
“Darkroom” by K. R. Alexander
“Mosquitoland” by David Arnold
“Wait till Helen Comes” by Mary Downing Hahn
“Ghost” by Jason Reynolds
“Slugfest” by Gordon Korman
“Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry
“Lines of Courage” by Jennifer A. Nielson
“Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen
“The Tale of Despereaux” by Kate DiCamillo
“Restart” by Gordon Korman
“Scythe” by Neal Shusterman
“Small Spaces” by Katherine Arden
“Starfish” by Lisa Fipps
“The Inheritance Games” by Jennifer Barnes
“Holes” by Louis Sachar
“The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown
“Out of My Mind” by Sharon Draper
“City Spies” by James Ponti
Young adult fiction
“Borrow my Heart” by Kasie West
“I’d Tell You I Love you but then I’d Have to Kill” You By Ally Carter
“You Should See Me in a Crown” by Leah Johnson
“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak
Adult fiction
“Funny Story” by Emily Henry
“Horse” by Geraldine Brooks
“All the Colors of the Dark” by Chris Whitaker
“James” by Percival Everett
“Orbital” by Samantha Harvey
“Tell Me Everything” by Elizabeth Strout
“The First Ladies” by Marie Benedict
“The Frozen River” by Ariel Lawhon
“The Fraud” by Zadie Smith
“Good Night, Irene” by Luis Alberto Urrea
“The House of Eve” by Sadeqa Johnson
“The Five Wishes of Mr. Murray McBride” by Joe Siple
“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
“The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell” by Robert Dugoni
“The Briar Club” by Kate Quinn
“Happiness Falls” by Angie Kim
“The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore
“The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman
“The Clinic” by Cate Quinn
“How to Solve Your Own Murder” by Kristen Perrin
“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Adult non-fiction
“Disarmed: the Radical Life and Legacy of Michael MJ Sharp” by Marshall V. King
“A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan’s plot to take over America and the woman who stopped them” by Timothy Egan
Plans to add more titles, including adult book club kits, are being explored.