🌞📚 First Meeting of the Summer Book Club

Such a great time to finally meet with students for our first ever summer book club! 

After inviting students from our 7-8 building and high school, we teacher librarians arranged to have multiple print and electronic copies of Fighting Words by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley available so we could read it in June and talk about different aspects of the story.

Given the content and themes of the book, we reached out to our Employee and Family Resources staff to ask about a guest speaker visiting during our meeting to talk about foster care and family trauma in our state and communities. A special thank you to Mary, who not only visited to share information and statistics, but also read the book to be able to join in with our discussion!

We began with favorite moments/characters--like Francine and Friday nights at the grocery story--and questions we had before moving on to an introductory video featuring the author:

Kimberly Brubaker Bradley Introduces FIGHTING WORDS from Penguin Classroom on Vimeo.

Next, Mary shared with us several statistics about child abuse in Iowa:

•  In 2021, there were more than 35,500 reports of abuse in Iowa. Nearly 9400 of those cases were founded/confirmed, with the majority of those cases (around 5300) involving children five years old or younger.

• Neglect contributes to 55% of the cases reported.

• In Polk and Dallas counties, where our communities are located, more than 5700 cases of abuse were confirmed in 2021.

Mary talked with us about the foster care system, including placement in emergency care, in a family setting, or in a group home, and she explained how someone like Suki from Fighting Words might age out of a system like the one we have here in Iowa.

Finally, Mary suggested things we can do if we are worried about any of our friends and are concerned for them: be supportive but not hovering; be there and remind friends that you're available; know about available resources; and, ask about today's feelings and actions.

We finished our discussion of the book by talking about our interpretations of the book cover, Della's conversation about superpowers, supporting characters, and adults who help vs. adults who ignore. Many students had already finished the whole book, but we tried to limit our conversation to Chapters 1 - 13, as we plan to meet again in two weeks to talk about the entire book. We'll also talk about our July read--which might be a variety of titles with the same theme. If you couldn't join us this time, we'd love to see you then!