Running a Book Club Part 2: Cannon Park Primary School

Posted on 13 April 2017

We asked Nicola Cleveland, school librarian at Cannon Park Primary School, to blog about her experience of running a Scholastic Book Club. In her second post, she talks about what happens after the children receive their leaflets.

Our online Scholastic Book Club was up and running, the children had taken their letters and brochures home, and all I had to do was wait…

The following morning I checked my emails, and orders were coming in. This happened every day for the first week. Then, using the prompt provided, I sent a quick text out and updated the school website to remind parents they had a week left to order their books. And still the daily email arrived, letting me know who had ordered what, and the current total of rewards.

On the final day, I checked the total of my Scholastic rewards, gathered my pupil librarians and between us, made a decision on which books to order for the school library. Of the whole process, this was without question, the hardest part! I closed the order, and received a confirmation email detailing the whole order by each individual order, and another to let me know the books were on their way.

Once the order was closed, I waited for the books to arrive. I was a little worried about sorting through the books to make sure the right books went to the right child, but I needn’t have been. Attached to the picking note were sheets of tear off book marks, one for each order, which made it easy to sort the books out and ensure they went to the right child.

And the books without a slip? They were the books I ordered with the rewards for our School Library! These are just two of the packs my pupil librarians chose; they were desperate to get their hands on the Famous Five collection having met them at the Coventry World Book Day Event.

Not bad for something that took very little of my time to organise and monitor, and added to the activities we ran as a school to promote books and reading during what turned into our March Book Month!

If you haven’t tried it, you really should. I’ll definitely be running Scholastic Book Clubs online from now on.

Find out more about Scholastic Book Clubs and how your school can be involved here.