Princess: Serina (Vice President)

Scribe: Sarah (Secretary)

Pirate: Wanda (Treasurer)

Jester: Mikaela (Recreation Leader)

If you live in Grant County, New Mexico, this is a Personal Invitation to Join the “Knights of the Random Table” – A Teen Reading and Writing Club for Grant County Teens. We would love for you to join our activities.  We have shared reading lists, group activities, get to write together and share our ideas, guest speakers, and so much more!  This fall we will have a display in the Silver City Public Library of some of our club's writing selections.  Get in on this and more. Contact us today. We meet the 3rd Saturday of each month at the Silver City Public Library!

(If you don't live in our area, we encourage you to start your own club.  Below we have information on how.)

To an Awesome Grant County, NM, Teen,

We welcome you to our world--a world of adventure, of danger, of romance, of beauty and sometimes of madness! It is a world of our creation.

We are the young authors and poets of Silver City, New Mexico.   We offer a setting in which you can share your work with peers that will try to be helpful and honest.  We hope to become better writers through this club. Also to better ourselves as writers, we read, and discuss what we have read.

Through this, we hope to be inspired and learn more about the world of writing. This is not to mention that reading is so much fun!

Feel free to come, even if you don’t write. You can be a critic and may even be inspired to start writing. So in short, we’re a writers/book club for teens, and we’d love for you to join us. We meet every third Saturday of the month at the Silver City Library at eleven o’clock. Just bring ideas and your writing.

I will post new reading lists and activities on this page as our activities grow. We even have an officer team. Some of our members help with reading to younger children. It is a lot of fun!

Reigning Queen of the Knights,

Marissa R.

If you don’t live in Grant County, New Mexico, maybe you can start your own club where you live. Send me an email and I will be glad to help you get one started.    AppleBookDrive@gmail.com.

 
     Teen Reading and
     Writing Club ---
     Inspiring writers and sharing
     in the passion of reading!

  Check out our Silver City Public Library  display with some of our member's writing 
                                               selections.


"HOW TO" Overview:
Starting Your Own Teen Reading-Writing Club in Your Community:

We have found that if you complement the book exchange with a Teen Reading and Writing Club, the success of the exchange will be enhanced.  Plus, youth get to participate in a rewarding, fun activity that opens doors to the world!     We distributed an invite letter to teens. [

Guidlines:

o   The first thing you’ll need to find is a location. Suggestions: Talk to your librarian at the school and local libraries. They may have a meeting place for you.

o   If you meet at school you’ll need permission from the principle. He/She may ask that you get a club sponsor.  Talk to your teachers. There are many people who most likely will be willing to help.

o   Advertise your club with flyers, articles in the school paper, and personal invitation letters. Anything you can think of helps, but the best way is word-of-mouth. So talk to your friends. You may want to check with the local papers and see if can place an  announcement on the community calendar. Check with your local radio station for a Public Service Announcement, known as a PSA.

o   Try to have regular meetings. We find it best to meet at least once a month, but you may want to meet more often.

Meeting:

During the first meeting you need to name you club and elect officers. Be creative with both. Instead of having a president, have a king or captain, with a scribe and court jester.

You’ll need to manage your time well. Allow half the meeting or more to writing and the rest to book discussion and club business.  Find out at the beginning of the meeting who has brought writing to share, and divide the time accordingly. Have the author read first, then allow a few minutes for comments.

Try to make it fun by playing music at the beginning of the meeting and playing games at the end. Be organized and follow through your plans.

Guest speakers:

It is great to get professional writers and journalists to come and share their work and experience. Write to magazines and news papers to see if anyone would be willing to talk to your club. Find out if you have any published authors in your community. If so, email them and ask them to come.

If you do get a guest speaker, it’s best to plan a meeting for them to just talk and save your usual meeting for next time.  It is amazing how much time can pass when someone interesting talks.  
 
Recognition:

            It is great to get recognition for club members. It will help your club grow in public awareness and give credit to youth activities. In our library there is a display case behind glass. We reserved two months and we display poetry and selected writings of teen members. This also gives us a chance to promote the club activities with photos and books that we are reading.  A bulletin board of activities is another great way to let people know what you are doing and gain excitement about the group’s activities.

Member Activities:

o   Work with “Take a Book-Leave a Book” program--This group is a perfect group to adopt book exchange boxes in the schools and community.  A team can be assigned to each box and make sure an assortment of age appropriate books are in each box. You may have to rotate books around between boxes. Also, some donated books will need to be repaired. Each meeting night, a small portion of time can be designated for book repair and labeling. Since some public and school libraries donate books, they require that all of their name stamps be marked out.

o   Mentor to Younger Children—It is great to establish times that club members will be present a school reading times or public library children reading times to read to younger children.  To volunteer tutoring is another great activity for club members.  This is a great opportunity to work with C.L.I.M.B.

    o   Write Selections Based on Themes—From meeting to meeting, you can discuss
        a theme for writing and then share those stories or poems at the next meeting.

    o   Develop Selected Reading Lists—Decide on common reading lists and then read
        the book or certain number of chapters of that book by the next meeting and then
        participate in open discussions of the book.

Lastly --  Keep in touch

Let us know when you start a club and keep us updated.  Email us a applebookdrive@gmail.com