Happy Day After Thanksgiving!  Feels great to have a few days to gather your thoughts and refocus, doesn’t it? To do all of the things that you don’t have time to do during the school year.

Now fast forward a month to the December holiday break.  Wouldn’t that be a great time to catch up on professional reading?

A few weeks ago, Beth Friese and I started talking on Twitter about Stephanie Harvey and Harvey Daniels’ new book, Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action.  With Harvey’s expertise with reading comprehension strategies and Daniels’ role as a literature circles pioneer, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on this book.  And, apparently, neither could many of those who joined in our conversation!

So … Beth is taking the lead in organizing a book club on the Teacher Librarian Ning that will run over our holiday break.  Everyone is welcome, so please order that book (free shipping! on sale!) and join us!

As Beth says,

As some of you may have heard on twitter, we are putting together a book group for teacher librarians and other educators. For our first book, we’ve decided to read “Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action” by Stephanie Harvey and Harvey Daniels. This book matches our current professional focus on inquiry, and promises to give all of us some practical ideas to implement in our schools. We hope this book will be relevant to all librarians, regardless of your school level.

Currently, this book is on sale from the publisher and offered with free shipping here:http://www.heinemann.com/products/E01230.aspx

We are planning to read the book over the winter break. I haven’t quite decided how the discussions will be structured. I’d love any suggestions you have about starting dates or other points such as: should we have a weekly synchronous chat? If so, where? Should there also be a discussion board where you can post anytime? What other modes of communication would enable a rich discussion?

If you are interested in participating, please post your information here so I can keep you updated. (And if you have already posted your info to another book group post here on the Ning, once is great.) In the mean time, order the book and get ready for some great conversation!

Thanks, Beth Friese
Twitter: @librarybeth

Many of us have our copy already and are fighting the urge to read it now.  (My district colleague, though, said she read the first few pages and cried.  She promptly took the book to her principal, who is offering it as a schoolwide read — wow!)

Let’s use this book as a chance to build on the excitement about inquiry that we felt at AASL 2009!

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