Mock Newbery Book Club: Spring 2016 favorite books (ages 9-12)

What books have been in your summer reading piles? As we prepared for summer last June, our Mock Newbery Book Club met to talk about books we've loved this spring and start our summer wish lists. Today, I'd like to share the books our kids talked about most as they headed into summer. Head over to the NerdyBookClub to read more about hosting your own Mock Newbery Book Club.

Emerson students building personal "To Read" lists with friends

The Mock Newbery Book Club at our school has been a highlight each of the last three years. Together with Armin Arethna, my buddy from Berkeley Public Library, we created a space, an environment, a community for students to grow as readers and share their excitement about different books. Our essential goals as we drew students together for this book club have been threefold:

• Honor students’ voices and their choices about reading
• Develop students’ opinions and thoughtful engagement with books
• Harness kids’ enthusiasm so they help create “book buzz” about new books

Throughout the spring, we met informally to talk about new books we were reading. Here is the selection of books we heard kids recommending most often to friends. We are trying to build consensus around which books kids will want to talk about, as we head toward our fall nominating meeting.

Mock Newbery Spring 2016 favorite books

4th/5th graders' Mock Newbery Book Club Spring 2016 favorite books:

• As Brave As You, by Jason Reynolds
• Booked, by Kwame Alexander
• Forest of Wonders, by Linda Sue Park
• Hour of the Bees, by Lindsay Eager
• The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson School, by Laura Shovan
• Paper Wishes, by Lois Sepahban
• Pax, by Sara Pennypacker
• Raymie Nightingale, by Kate DiCamillo
• Some Kind of Courage, by Dan Gemeinhart
• Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard, by Jonathan Auxier

We welcome all 4th and 5th grade students--kids love being part of a club. We work hard to introduce a variety of books to students, so that there is diversity in genre, race, ethnicity, style and reading levels. The Newbery Committee itself is reading many many more than these ten titles, but we try to focus on ten books that reflect a range of interests and reading levels for our students.

We are never all reading the same book--instead, we focus on asking students what they're reading and what they think about it. We talk about the Newbery criteria, but really that just helps them think more carefully about a book, going beyond, "I loved it!" to talking about the writing, the story, and the characters.

I'd like to give a special thanks to my friends in our Voxer Mock Newbery group--this group of librarians and teachers help keep me in touch with other classes across the country. Many thanks to the publishers for sharing review copies: Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HarperCollins, Candlewick, Macmillan, Random House, Scholastic and Abrams. If you make a purchase using the Amazon links on this site, a small portion goes to Great Kid Books. Thank you for your support.

©2016 Mary Ann Scheuer, Great Kid Books