Parents: what can you do if your school doesn’t run a Book Club?

Posted on 13 October 2016

Scholastic Book Clubs are a fantastic, fun way to help your children fall in love with reading; each half-term, we put together a new selection of the latest and most well-loved children’s books at the best-value prices – every one of which is read and chosen by our team of experts – so that your children can easily pick out the books they’re excited about reading next, and then we can deliver them to your school for free.

What’s more, for every order over £10 you spend with us, Scholastic donate 20% back in books and resources to a school of your choosing. That means you’ll not only be helping your own children get excited about reading, but you’ll also be helping teachers build brilliant libraries for the whole school to enjoy.

However, what happens if your school doesn’t currently run a Book Club? Well here are five things you can do to still be involved:

1. Book Clubs can easily be run by your school’s parent teacher association (PTA) to help raise much needed funds for the school. To run a club, you will need to use the school for delivery of your leaflets and your chosen books, but if your school office doesn’t mind taking these two deliveries, your PTA can run the whole thing. You might find it easier to run an online club – this way, you can set up parent online ordering on our shop, email parents the details and let them know they can add to it. Parents can browse the leaflets on the shop, order what they want and pay directly online – all you need to do is remind them to order by your deadline. The whole thing takes just a couple of minutes to set up and there’s a full step-by-step guide to running a Book Club here.

If you are doing it for the first time and need a bit more help, our customer service team can talk you through setting up parent online ordering and what to do next – just give them a call on 0845 6039091.

2. Equally, you can run a Book Club as an individual on behalf of your child’s class – it would be exactly the same process as above, just on a smaller scale. You could hand out the leaflets to your fellow parents at pick-up with a note explaining how to order and how the school will benefit from orders. You could collate the order and money yourself on one order form or set it up as a group order online so you don’t have to handle the money. Then, when the class order is complete, you can tell your teacher how much you have earned them in Scholastic Rewards so they can choose some free books and resources for your child’s own classroom – a brilliant gift that you will directly see the benefit of!

3. Talk to your child’s teacher! Maybe they’ve never come across Scholastic Book Clubs before and would like to be involved. We have lots of helpful information for teachers on this page, or they can always get in touch with our customer service team directly here.

4. If you would prefer not to be involved with running the Book Clubs yourself, you don’t necessarily have to rely on teachers if they’re too pressed for time – Book Clubs can also be run by any school staff member, whether that’s staff administrators or school librarians. Remember to remind them that any parent orders will help them stock their libraries for free!

5. If you are unable to start Book Clubs in your school, you can still take part – parents don’t have to be part of an organised Book Club or receive a catalogue from a school or nursery to be involved. All you have to do is buy your children’s books from our online shop and nominate the school or nursery of your choosing to receive the 20% back at checkout. It’s really that easy to start earning free books and resources for your school!

If you’re ready to start running a Book Club, click here for a step-by-step guide to running a Club as a parent.

Find out more about Scholastic Book Clubs and view our latest selection of books now.