OyMG by Amy Fellner Dominy tells the story of Ellie, who hopes her skills at debate will help her win a scholarship to a prestigious private high school. The trouble is, she finds that her religion may count against her in the selection process. When she decides to hide who she is to increase her chances of winning the award she sets off a whole new debate among her family and friends.

OyMG brings up great issues to discuss in mother-daughter book clubs, and my new meeting planner guide for this book helps you plan what to do, what to talk about, and what to cook when you schedule your book club meeting to discuss it.

As with all the meeting planner guides offered at Mother Daughter Book Club. com, the OyMG guide contains a book review, an interview with the author, a list of discussion questions, suggested activities and book-related recipes you can cook for your crowd.

To see the whole list of ten titles and learn more about my ebook offering six guides at a discount, visit the Meeting Planner Guides page at Mother Daughter Book Club. com.

Also, watch for more information about these two new guides that will be available in late December:

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko

If you’d like to suggest a title for me to add, just send me an email at info@motherdaughterbookclub.com.

Thomas Friedman is more known for his observations on world affairs than family affairs, but in a recent opinion article for the New York Times, Friedman talks about how children show higher success rates in school when their parents read to them in the early years and are involved with their lives as they grow.

Friedman’s opinion piece cites a study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., that looked beyond students’ performance on tests to help determine why some were more successful than others. Not surprisingly, parental involvement was found to play a key role. Of particular note was this finding: “Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family socioeconomic background.”

To see the findings from O.E.C.D. and to see other studies, including one that looks at how reading for pleasure affects success in school, visit the PISA home page.

These findings strengthen the case for family books clubs. When you have a family book club, it helps you prioritize reading with your child and talk about what you read. Reading groups are also a way to keep everyone in the family reading for fun, even as the kids grow up and become involved in more activities that take them away from home.

November is National Family Literacy Month. Now is a good time to consider starting your own family reading group. To help you get started, I’ve written a few articles about reading with your family. Also, I’m giving away a copy of my guidebook for mother-daughter book clubs to someone who comments by the end of the day this Friday, November 25. It’s called Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs, and many of the recommendations found there can be adapted for reading groups created within a single family. Here’s where to find the other articles:

Tips on Starting a Family Book Club

Books for Family Reading Groups to Read Out Loud

Activities and Games Extend the Fun of Reading in Family Book Clubs

When my daughters were young, reading books together was one of our favorite things to do as a family. Most often, my husband, daughters and I would snuggle up together just before the girls went to sleep, and either my husband or I would read aloud. We stopped often to laugh or talk about something we had just read. No matter how many directions we went during the day, it was comforting for me to know that for 20 or 30 minutes each night, we would put aside time to be together and focus on a story.

We didn’t call what we did a family book club, but that is in effect what we created. I like to think those family book sessions helped spark an early interest in reading that later led to our mother-daughter book clubs and our continued interest in sharing books together. If you’re considering starting your own family group, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

1. Find a consistent time to read, and make sure that no other distractions get in the way. For many families, that window of time comes up just before the kids go to bed. It’s sometimes easy for busy parents to fill this time with chores, but everyone benefits from a breather where you are all focused on engaging in an activity together.
2. Choose books that your kids will think are fun and imaginative. Children love to hear about fantastical worlds where the rules they are familiar with don’t apply. When your children are very little, you can start out with picture books that you read over and over again, talking about something new in the story each time. As they grow, you can graduate to more complicated stories that cover issues of family and friendships.
3. Make the time a treat, and don’t force it as a punishment. This should be a fun time for everyone. If the book isn’t resonating, don’t keep going just because you think your kids need to finish the story. If this happens, they will look for ways to get out of family reading time and so will you. At the same time, don’t threaten to cancel your reading sessions if your kids do something you disapprove of. Your book club should be a way to grow closer together, not further apart.
4. Be open to other storytelling methods. We used to love listening to the stories on NPR’s Rabbit Ears Radio. For a half hour, we would all lie quietly and listen to the tale being read, then we talked about it afterward. You can look for books on tape or seek out a storyteller that performs at the library or somewhere else in your community.
5. Don’t be afraid to use funny voices as you read, and stop to explain something if you need to. My daughters usually didn’t interrupt, but sometimes while reading I got the feeling they didn’t really understand what was happening in the story. When my husband or I stopped and asked if they knew what was going on, we had a chance to talk about it and they often learned something new.
6. Bring something you read about into another part of your day. For instance, if the characters in a book enjoy eating ice cream, set up a time when everyone in the family can go out for a treat just like in the story.

November is National Family Literacy Month, and I’ll be presenting ideas for families to read together throughout the month. You may want to look at this article on good books to consider for your family book club. And don’t forget to add a comment to my previous post for your chance to win a copy of Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs. I’ll be giving away one copy each Friday in November to help encourage new clubs to form.

Today is National Family Literacy day, the start of a whole month devoted to families reading together. To celebrate, I’ll be giving away one copy each week of my guidebook, Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs. While Book by Book is geared to book clubs made up of moms and daughters, the tips you find there can be adapted to most any kind of reading group you want to start. That includes father-son and parent-child as well as kids only and adults only.

What’s so important about family literacy? For one thing, being able to read and understand well are crucial skills that help both kids and adults be successful at both school and work. And reading for fun is especially important, as a study by Scholastic, Inc. found that children who read for fun are more likely to think of themselves as good students and be successful at school. Book clubs are a way to keep reading fun.

Throughout November, I’ll be sharing tips on ways you can get your family reading together and talking about what you read. Along with the book lists I publish with suggestions by age group, you can use these tips as inspiration to start your own mother-daughter book club, family reading group or something else that promotes reading. For more in depth advice on getting a group off the ground, you’ll want your own copy of Book by Book. So don’t forget to leave a comment on this post talking about anything related to literacy. You could list some of your favorite books or say why reading is important to you. If you’re already in a book club you may want to say what you like about your group. Each Friday, I will choose a winner from the comments posted. If you don’t win the first week, your comment will be considered among the list of entries for the next three weeks.

An article in today’s Omaha World-Herald talks about the rise of mother-daughter book clubs and it touches on some of the reasons these groups are so popular. If you’re already in a book club with your daughter, you probably know many of the reasons brought up in the article. For one, mother-daughter book clubs help moms and daughters talk about important topics that may not otherwise come up. For another, these reading groups are fun.

I particularly liked the comment from the mom who said that being in a book club with her daughter has helped them have a common interest as her daughter has gotten older and become more independent. It’s natural that as kids get older they want to spend more time with their friends than with their parent, so having a shared activity can be an important way for moms to stay connected to their teen daughters during that time. Plus, book club meetings are one of the few times that the two come together somewhat as equals, because their opinions and thoughts about what they read have equal validity.

Reading groups such as these also help moms and daughters get insight into issues that are important to each of them. When many of us have every minute scheduled from the time we get up in the morning until we go to bed at night, having a book club “forces” us to schedule in time to talk about these issues when it would be easier to do something else.

Here’s the link to the full article by Michael O’Connor. Also, I provided a few tips and book suggestions in a sidebar that went along with the article.

I recently read an article in Time magazine about Girl Up (girlup.org), an organization that “aims to mobilize 100,000 American girls to raise money and awareness to fight poverty, sexual violence and child marriage. In the article, writer Nancy Gibbs talks about how educating girls can have such a huge impact on societies all over the world. Here are some of the statistics she quotes:

• An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 percent to 25 percent
• Girls who stay in school for seven or more years typically marry four years later and have two fewer children than girls who dropp out.
• When girls and women earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it in their families.
• Less than 2 cents of every development dollar goes to girls.

Girl Up is a campaign of the United Nations Foundation, and its website has great information about what they do and how you may be able to get involved. I encourage you to check out the site; you may even be inspired to get your mother-daughter book club involved in a project that may benefit girls around the world.

Kim Culbertson, author of Instructions for a Broken Heart and Songs for a Teenage Nomad, is also a high school teacher. On her website you’ll find recommended activities that go with her books. I particularly like the Song Journal and the Collage Poem activities.

You can download instructions for both of these at Culbertson’s website. While you’re there you may want to sign up for her monthly newsletter.

The Song Journal is an exercise that helps teens identify songs that are important to them and write about why the music is significant in some way.

I’ve always had fun working on collages, and the Collage Poem is a great way to combine visual images with the written word. Culbertson’s instructions include a copy of a collage poem she created.

I like that both of these activities are appropriate for teens, and that they enhance not only the reading of Culbertson’s books, but they can be used in other creative ventures as well.

I love puzzles almost as much as I love books. When I see crosswords, Sudoku grids and word search puzzles, my fingers start to itch and I scan the clues even if I don’t have a pencil in my hand and don’t intend to solve it.

Solving puzzles is mostly a solitary activity, one I like to do on my own without input. So I was particularly please when I recently discovered a game that is like a puzzle for multiple players. It’s called Bananagrams, and you can play in groups of two all the way up to 7 or more, so it’s easy to be social while fulfilling your puzzling urge.

Here’s how it works. Each player gets a certain number of tiles, each printed with a letter of the alphabet. Each player then has to create words with their tiles in any combination they can come up with. It’s sort of like a cross between Scrabble and Boggle. Every word is distinct, but every player builds her own word puzzle instead of everybody building on everybody else’s words.

What I really like about Banaagrams is that you can change the words you’ve created as you go along. For instance, once when I played I built the word player into my puzzle. Then I decided I could use the “e” and “r” in another place to help me use more tiles. So I just took those two letters off and used them elsewhere.

It’s a creative way to keep you thinking about all the possibilities of which words letters can create. My husband, daughter and I had a great time playing Bananagrams. It took a lot of concentration at first, but once we got the hang of it, it was really challenging and a lot of fun. I also liked that there are no scores to add up or records to keep (you could add a scoring system easily is you’re competitive.) I recommend it as a family game or as an activity to add to your book club meetings.

The game comes in a bright yellow, banana-shaped pouch that’s easy to pack and take with you on a vacation. It also takes up very little room on your game shelf. I have seen Bananagrams for sale in many bookstores. You can also check it out on the company’s website: http://www.bananagrams-intl.com.

When book club members get together you can usually count on good fun, good company and great socializing. What’s not to like? But with all the fun you have at meetings, it may be easy to forget that you need to exert a little effort too if you want to have good discussions.

You may balk at the idea that book club has to be work at all. Sometimes what you’re looking for after a long day at work or with the kids is just to escape. The last thing you may want is another obligation hanging over your head.

Yet without a good discussion, book club is just another social event. And while that may be okay for a meeting or two, over the long term you and other members may find yourselves dissatisfied without good book talk to anchor your time together.

The good news is that spending a little effort to be a good book club member doesn’t have to take a lot of time or energy. Here are a few tips you may want to keep in mind whether you’re attending a book club meeting or hosting one.

1. Come prepared to talk about the book. Think about what you liked or disliked about it, and point to specific examples. You can save time by marking passages with sticky notes as you read so you don’t have to go back and look for examples after you’re done.
2. Give your full attention to other members when they talk, and don’t start a separate conversation with the person sitting next to you.
3. Save unrelated personal stories for social time leading up to or after book discussion.
4. When it’s your turn to choose the book, be ready to recommend a title. That way everyone can get started reading soon after the meeting if they’d like.
5. When you host book club, have a set of questions ready to keep conversation going. Otherwise it may be easy for discussion to get off track.
6. Be ready with dates in mind that work for your next meeting., and offer to help clean up before you go.

My non-mother-daughter-book-club friends are often surprised when I say I really like reading the same books my daughters do. They’re inclined to think that anything that appeals to kids and teens can’t possibly hold the interest of adults. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, I would say that some of my favorite books of all time are ones I have shared with my daughters. Part of the reason is definitely the fact that when we read together we also talk about issues brought up in the book. But it’s also true that many books written for children are simply good literature as well as fun to read.

Authors who successfully write for children usually have to get into the plot quicker to hold their readers’ attention. They also typically do not have the luxury of taking a long time to build their characters or write page after page of background. But they still have to tell a good story. And a good story well told resonates with readers whether they are nine or 90.

Here are a few of my favorite picks for books that appeal to two, or more, generations of readers.

9 and 10 year olds

Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

11 through 13 year olds

Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce

The Healing Spell by Kimberley Griffiths Little

Red Scarf Girl by Ji Li Jiang

Ages 14 and up

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee