CLUB Read

CLUB Read is a program designed to help students foster and nurture a love for reading.

Suggested booklists that children and young adults find interesting and want to read are compiled by Perma-Bound Curriculum Specialists using the following guidelines:

A new theme, brief synopsis, and a corresponding suggested booklist for grades K-12 is posted quarterly on this page, and is also included in our Perma-Gram e-newsletter.

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Club Read

CLUB Read: Saving Planet Earth

Planet Earth is critical life support. It sustains human, animal, and plant life by producing air, water, food, and habitat needs. The web of life depends upon these natural resources, and it is our responsibility to take good care of them.

Clean air and water are essential to combat diseases such as respiratory, typhoid, diarrhea, cancer, and other life-threatening problems. Good nutrition and a clean and safe environment are necessary for survival--so we need to actively preserve our environment.

It’s essential to teach students how to protect the environment. Introduce the 3 R’s: reduce waste, reuse resources, and recycle materials. Celebrate Earth Day every year on April 22. Organize tree-planting days at school and explain the reason trees are important. Show them how to plant a vegetable container garden and amend soil with kitchen food waste. Encourage students to pick up after themselves at home and at school. Let them know that even small actions, such as switching off all appliances and lights when not in use, contribute to the health of the planet and its inhabitants.

Share the following books from Perma-Bound to help your students become more aware of their role in environmental protection. Conserving where possible, repairing damage, and reversing trends can save our planet Earth.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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CLUB Read Editions

Club Read: Books To Movies


Books To Movies

A great way to get your students interested in reading and facilitate classroom discussion is to find a book that has made the big screen.

Most students love to watch movies, and this exercise gives you an opportunity to have them read the book in class and then watch the film version. Your classroom discussion will then help enhance critical thinking skills, including compare/contrast, by noting the similarities and differences that appear in print versus on-screen.

Another option is to analyze the language in both versions—i.e. how words are used. For instance, students may find it easier to understand certain parts of the story by observing in the film how the words were conveyed, including the tone of voice and body language of the speaker.

Help your students enjoy “matinee time” by reading the book then watching the movie. Perma-Bound’s collection development specialists have compiled the following book lists featuring “books to movies” your students will love.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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Club Read: You're My Inspiration


Teachers are powerful motivators! They inspire students to learn information, helping them to successfully navigate through their lives. However, education is not just about the mind; it’s also about the heart. What we are passionate about drives what we choose to pursue. Connecting to what others have experienced allows our hearts to expand and prompts our minds to open to inspiration.

Reading can help students do this. Learning about others’ courage and optimism in sometimes difficult circumstances can inspire them to be courageous and optimistic, too, encouraging them to believe in themselves and be mindful of others’ life experiences

Pausing daily to allow “down-time” in the classroom while sharing your life experiences will create a deeper connection with your students as well. That connection with you will foster trust, which will enhance students’ ability to focus and retain more mind- and heart-knowledge. Teaching “pause-ability” can also give them a useful tool to overcome challenges, or a way to interrupt the “busyness” of life and relish their life journey. Being able to feel comfortable creating their own experiences gives them the courage to claim their own lives. They can become the change they want to see.

Inspire your students to reach their full potential by learning to be the catalysts and game-changers our world needs today. Incorporate transforming experiences in your classroom by providing the following inspirational books from Perma-Bound.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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Club Read: What Do You Want To Do?


Eventually, your students will become responsible for themselves and need to exchange time and skills for an income—a livelihood endeavor. Teaching them to choose a career that fosters joy, honors core values, and justly rewards efforts is an important goal.

When and how do you begin the career-choice process? It starts with fostering students’ understanding that they are indeed valuable. This is a message that must begin in the earliest grade possible and should continue throughout students’ educational career. Understanding and perceiving their value will give them the courage to reach for their dreams. Providing supportive steps and resources will foster character development and the initiative to form goals.

Training in goal-setting can be as simple as providing a daily chart to track progress and reward achievements. Organized and scaled benchmarks create the path of action to program the mind for actionable goals. If goal-seeking becomes too overwhelming, encourage students to still their minds and transform their thoughts with mindfulness exercises that allow them to be "in the moment." Help them reboot by emphasizing the importance of rest and relaxation. Teach them to focus on the conscious mind to create calm and help restore productive energy. Affirmations such as I will…, I am…, I have…, are one way to help students refocus on their life path.

While teaching your students self-worth and the importance of benchmarks, actions, and affirmations, allow them to safely ask questions—especially when they are in "reboot" mode. Instead of criticizing—which builds walls—raise their awareness by helping them learn from experience, and guide their minds to what is working. Build trust.

You can facilitate this process by providing support materials such as books, newspapers, magazines, technical manuals, art, and videos. Schedule career professionals to give presentations. Reward students’ progress with structured school field trips that dovetail with vocational interests.

Most of all, allow students’ passion to lead them to the reality they wish to pursue. Let them read, read, read. You can help encourage, enlighten, and inspire your students with the following age-appropriate fiction and career-related nonfiction selections from Perma-Bound.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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Club Read: Urban Nation


By invoking the excitement, cultural diversity, and grittiness of city life, urban literature can promote understanding between cultures.

Imagine BookReading urban literature—K-12 fiction set in an urban environment—can open up new vistas for students, regardless of where they live. It can stimulate reflection and open-mindedness, improve self-esteem, and foster involvement and engagement. And, as with all fiction-reading, it can boost academic performance and literacy.

Students can enjoy urban literature on different levels. They can explore and process difficult situations and emotions in the safe environment of fiction, or gain an appreciation of urban history and culture. They may even be inspired to write their own urban prose or poetry!

Furthermore, urban literature can help students gain a greater appreciation of their own communities, from people and playgrounds to buildings and businesses. The urban landscape, whether imagined or remembered, can open a window on a myriad of experiences surrounding love, loss, joy, community, and family life.

And, by revealing the excitement, diversity, and grittiness of city life, urban literature can promote students’ understanding of other cultures and life experiences, as well as exposing them to some of the great artists, authors, poets, musicians, and thinkers whose lives were molded by the urban environment. At its best, such reading inspires open-mindedness, greater acceptance of differences, and hope for a better, more inclusive and cooperative future.

Promote reading and library use with the following urban literature selections from Perma-Bound.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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Club Read: One Picture, A Thousand Words


Pictures were humanity’s first cross-cultural communications, and it was through "picture power" that people first began sharing thoughts, ideas, and experiences across space and time. Prehistoric pictograms were the personal reflection of the mind’s eye—the interpretation of what was seen in the natural world—painted on stone walls and tablets.

As humanity progressed, modes of expression such as art, dance, music, gestures, objects, signs, symbols, photography, and digital imagery all became opportunities to tell a story. Throughout human history, visual syntax and semantics have been the springboard to understanding beyond words. And, in our increasingly visual world, visual literacy education has become an essential core curriculum component necessary to succeed in the classroom and in everyday life.

So, how does imagery communicate meaning? The answer is, through storytelling—the expression of ideas and emotions by sending or receiving messages using images. The picture story is without spoken or written word, yet is understood across global and cultural language barriers. Images force the viewer to reflect and answer questions: How is the visual story constructing a particular reality or meaning? What is the context? What is the subject matter? Decoding and interpretation require pausing and reflecting on each visual message to understand the truth of what is being communicated.

Visual competencies are critical to surviving in our culture, where images have an enormous influence on values, beliefs, attitudes, and lifestyles. This is a time of blogs, podcasts, creative text messaging, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, gaming, print ads, web ads, billboards, theater, museums, classroom, and television imagery. Shared cultural understanding influences what we learn from images, and dictates how they are perceived, reflected upon, and interpreted.

Your students are overwhelmed daily by visual images that require constructive visual interpretation. Students have become audiences, both in the classroom and out. Help them to become savvy participants in our visual world as well, with the following visual literacy books from Perma-Bound.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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CLUB Read: Visual Literacy


Ninety percent of the information we take in every day is visual. Your students are constantly viewing illustrations, pictures, art, diagrams, and text. Visual literacy will help them decode, understand, and communicate better with the world around them.

So, what do you look for when choosing books for your students to teach them about visual literacy?

Critical aspects of teaching this skill include complexity of ideas, rich illustrations, themes, layers of meaning, and a variety of text type. These elements require skills to negotiate the complex interplay between visual clues within images and text, as well as the visual expression of the written word.

Illustrated fiction books prompt readers to explore allusions, cryptic symbols, and possibly hidden text in the artwork. Non-fiction books featuring bright photos and creative text displays such as boxes, sidebars, and magazine-style formatting are interesting, and give the reader several avenues with which to explore and connect. Decoding a graph, picture, or illustration can give the reader a sense of story and chronology— a seed of comprehension that can flower into understanding.

Teaching visual literacy trains the mind’s eye for visual capacity in text. Engaging text can evoke highly visual and powerful thoughts, which in turn create visual imagery in the mind, producing critical thinking and understanding of context.

The following books meet the requirements to teach and enhance classroom visual literacy skills.

Elementary

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Middle School

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High School

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