Starbooks Book Tasting in Middle School ELA for Book Clubs and Literature Circles

I have dreamed of creating a middle school poetry unit with lesson plans, tons of reading response examples of poetry analysis, along with a verse novels book club and activities component. I have spent the last month creating this complete middle school poetry reading and writing unit.

I have a whole blog post about the actual poetry verse/novel unit, but I though I would do a quick blog post on our Starbooks book tasting. I used this idea to get students into their verse novel book clubs.

GETTING STUDENTS INTO BOOK CLUBS

I wanted to build the excitement about verse novels and book clubs in general. There had been some Starbooks and/or book tasting ideas floating around social media and I knew I wanted to use it. Book clubs seemed liked the perfect time to implement. this idea.

I created a simple resource that has a variety of menus (so you could use the menus for any genre of book clubs). I also included the Starbooks letters and some table signs. The Starbooks resource also explain how I set everything up.

VERSE NOVEL OPTIONS

I had a variety of verse novels out for students to look through. Students were given about 4-5 minutes at each station (6 stations) to read the synopsis and first few pages of the book. They then had to fill out their menus with their choices. The menus they filled out were used to put them into book clubs. I told them to put their top five choices on the front of the menu. They were also encouraged to read more than just six books, because any of their top five could become their book club book.

My TPT store has a full resource of book recommendations, but I created a middle school and young adult verse novel version as a freebie just for you.

STARBOOKS CAFE AND BOOK TASTING

I set up a little Starbooks café to get the kids excited about picking their verse novels. I ordered the white cups, lids, and sleeves from amazon. The little Starbucks labels were just printed and glued them on to the sleeves. I then got 100 mini-muffins from Sam’s club/Costco. The drinks are Starbucks “Refreshers” which was just strawberry lemonade because I could buy one of the big lemonade containers from Sam’s club as well. Students were able to get a drink and muffin before we started the book rotations.

For the menu, I printed the letters (included in the file) and just taped a bunch of butcher paper together. I used a white chalk marker to write the menu of verse novel selections.