Adventurers Wanted - Book Clubs, Part 1

Let's talk book clubs. Ours was so much fun today!

Once upon a time, the vision in my head of a book club was adults sitting around with something akin to tea and crumpets, philosophizing and expounding on the virtues of Victorians or the vices of Russian authors.  (Sorry to my Russian readers. I still haven't recovered from reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as a teen.  Maybe I should revisit it as an adult to make peace with it?)  I envisioned a book club for youth to be a cross between that and the discussions we had in my AP English classes in high school.  

When my three younger children needed some sort of activity to do with friends that was both social and educational, I decided each needed his/her own book club, but they needed to be reinvented book clubs.  Thus, I've tried to tap in to both the needs and personalities of the members of each club, and also tap into the ideas and activities in the books.

In "Book Clubs, Part 1" I'll share a detailed narrative of today's meeting.  In "Book Clubs, Part 2" I'll share highlights of past book clubs to give you a range of examples of ideas.  

The reading for today's book club meeting* was the first of the "Adventurers Wanted" series, Slathbog's Gold.  Most of the boys cruised ahead and have also already read the rest of the books in the series that are published to date.  These books were a big hit with the boys.

First, I posted a sign on my front door in invisible ink to begin the adventure, representing the magic sign main character Alex saw that started him on his first adventure.

Next, I measured each boy for his weapons, just as Alex was measured in the book.  I handed each boy the weapons they measured for, which included things like a boom-a-rang, a giant fly swatter, a plastic baseball bat, a rope.  (These were just cheap things I purchased at the dollar store.)  I then checked that everyone had their "magic bags" (backpacks) loaded with lunch, liquids, and their new weapons, and we headed out for a four-mile bike ride from my house to a trail head at the mouth of a nearby canyon.

My best laid plans went awry before we even arrived because I had tasked my older boys to get there before us and lay wait in the woods to ambush the book club boys like the bandits in the book, but my older boys underestimated how fast the younger boys would ride their bikes, therefore those of us on bikes got to the trail first.  To distract the younger boys, I sent them through the woods to the river so my older boys could sneak ahead on the trail in the opposite direction.  

Now, being boys, and Cub Scouts, they didn't leave home without pocket knives, which means they immediately took to the trees and sawing off some limbs and skinning them for  swords.

Then we began the hike.  They made whistles of snake grass along the way.

We had hiked long past the point where I thought my older boys would be hiding.  Here's where the whole thing got really adventurous.  I forgot to mention that earlier I accidentally encountered what I assumed was a man relieving himself on the other side of the river.  We reached a point on the trail where we were kind of closed in and anyone could be hiding in all sorts of places.  As the boys paused to look at the river, a rock landed in it that none of us had thrown.  The boys looked at each other. Rocks began to fly over our heads and bushes were shaking.  It alarmed the younger boys; they shouted out some brave threats and then kept going on the trail, looking back over their shoulders.  They saw more movement and could tell that someone was following us.  I secretly called my oldest son to see if that was him behind us, and he said that it wasn't.  So I became alarmed, thinking back to the guy I'd seen earlier.  As we trudged ahead, the younger boys continued to spot someone dashing here and crawling there from bush to bush.  I kept wondering how much further until we reached my big boys.  The younger boys were under the impression that I'd hidden treasure somewhere along the trail and they wanted to find it already and get out of there.  

All of a sudden P1 came running over the hill at us with a club.  The younger boys freaked out, until they realized who it was.  I told them he was a bandit and to go get him and claim his treasure. But the treasure was with P2, who had gone running back the other way.  Long hike and long story short, the younger boys finally did catch P2, "beat him up," and won his treasure.  (If you're thinking this sounds awful, it was all play, and you have to read the book to see that this wasn't teaching delinquency.)

The treasure was gold and gems, aka Rolos and Ring Pops.

I should also mention that the adventure was heightened by the intermittent rain that fell, which the boys pointed out was perfect because the adventurers in the book got caught in a storm as well. 

After all this, my older boys went home and the book club boys went back to their tree to eat their lunches. We talked about the book as we sat there.  After spending another hour or so in the woods, climbing some more, whittling some more, walking the river, and having a knife throwing contest, we rode our bikes the four miles home, stopping to inspect three road-killed snakes along the way.  It was a grand adventure, perfect for the book we read, but also an example of turning reading into more than just a solitary, sedentary activity.

*Normally there are six boys in this book club.  It's been hard trying to jive everyone's schedules this summer.

A funny side note is that when I woke my older boys this morning and gave them some instructions for the day, which also included some economics reading, P2 rolled over and said, "Fantastic. School work and I get to get beat up.  Great day."