Book Clubs: Unit 1

1. Book Clubs: Unit 1

2. What are book clubs? • A time for people to read a book that they WANT to read • A group of people to talk about your book with • A place to question, debate, and analyze with your peers

3. Your Responsibilities • Follow your reading calendar every night. • Answer your guided reading questions in your book packet while you read. • Look up vocabulary words selected by Ms. Gelz. • Use context clues or the dictionary to figure out other unknown words. • Come to book club meetings prepared to LISTEN and DISCUSS what you have read.

4. Speed Dating: Find Your Book Soul Mate • As you rotate to each book, investigate the following information: • Title • Number of pages • About how many pages long are the chapters • Based on the front cover, what do you think the book is about? • Read the back cover. What information does it give you about the book? • Open the book and read one full page from the middle. Rate the difficulty: Easy Medium Hard

5. Meet Your Contestants

6. The Hunger Games • In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old KatnissEverdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival.

7. The Hunger Games • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbA63a7H0bo

8. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas • Berlin 1942 • When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. • But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

9. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itXGr-MXESs

10. Tangerine • Paul Fisher sees the world from behind glasses so thick he looks like a bug-eyed alien. But he’s not so blind that he can’t see there are some very unusual things about his family’s new home in Tangerine County, Florida. Where else does a sinkhole swallow the local school, fire burn underground for years, and lightning strike at the same time every day? • The chaos is compounded by constant harassment from his football–star brother, and adjusting to life in Tangerine isn’t easy for Paul—until he joins the soccer team at his middle school. With the help of his new teammates, Paul begins to discover what lies beneath the surface of his strange new hometown. And he also gains the courage to face up to some secrets his family has been keeping from him for far too long. In Tangerine, it seems, anything is possible. • Twelve-year-old Paul, who lives in the shadow of his football hero brother Erik, fights for the right to play soccer despite his near blindness and slowly begins to remember the incident that damaged his eyesight.

11. Tangerine • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-czj-TCrvvE

12. Holes • Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnats. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the warden makes the boys "build character" by spending all day, every day, digging holes: five feet wide and five feet deep. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.

13. Holes • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEvLRtDKT0c

14. Girl, Stolen • Sixteen year-old Cheyenne Wilder is sleeping in the back of a car while her mom fills her prescription at the pharmacy. Before Cheyenne realizes what's happening, their car is being stolen—with her inside! Griffin hadn’t meant to kidnap Cheyenne, all he needed to do was steal a car for the others. But once Griffin's dad finds out that Cheyenne’s father is the president of a powerful corporation, everything changes—now there’s a reason to keep her. What Griffin doesn’t know is that Cheyenne is not only sick with pneumonia, she is blind. How will Cheyenne survive this nightmare, and if she does, at what price?

15. Girl, Stolen • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onz7f4gWl7U

16. The Maze Runner • Imagine waking up one day in total darkness, unsure of where you are and unable to remember anything about yourself except your first name. You're in a bizarre place devoid of adults called the Glade. The Glade is an enclosed structure with a jail, a graveyard, a slaughterhouse, living quarters, and gardens. And no way out. Outside the Glade is the Maze, and every day some of the kids -- the Runners -- venture into the labyrinth, trying to map the ever-changing pattern of walls in an attempt to find an exit from this hellish place. So far, no one has figured it out. And not all of the Runners return from their daily exertions, victims of the maniacal Grievers, part animal, part mechanical killing machines.Thomas is the newest arrival to the Glade. A motley crew of half a dozen kids is all he has to guide him in this strange world. As soon as he arrives, unusual things begin to happen, and the others grow suspicious of him. Though the Maze seems somehow familiar to Thomas, he's unable to make sense of the place, despite his extraordinary abilities as a Runner. What is this place, and does Thomas hold the key to finding a way out?

17. The Maze Runner • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv8ffeBcRC8

18. Pick Your Top Choices • On a sheet of loose leaf: • Which of these books have you already read? • What book would you most like to read? • What book is your second choice? • What book is your third choice? • Is there a book you do NOT want to read? (Which book and why?)