For the fourth year in a row, Junior Great Books is being offered at St. Bernardine's to students in grades two to six. In addition to introducing children to a world of ideas beyond Nickelodeon, the program teaches skills our students will use in high school and beyond.

Currently three volunteer instructors have taken Great Book's leadership training course to become group leaders. Volunteers are needed for next year. So please contact us if you enjoy good literature--from Rudyard Kipling and A.A. Milne to folk tales from around the world--and the idea of sharing it with children.

When parents sign up their children for Great Books, a letter is sent home outlining Junior Great Book's philosophy. The program stresses the enjoyment of literature for its own sake; develops comprehension and critical thinking along with verbal and written language skills; and encourages young readers to ask questions about the meaning of a story as they explore, support and develop their own insights.

Groups meet once a week during recess from late October through April. The routine of meetings, if there is one, is to go over a story with the children to get them thinking about the theme. Then the leader reads the story and asks an initial question. Next, the children read the story on their own. They also do an assignment that encourages them to focus on a certain aspect of the story (e.g., the behavior of one of the characters) and draw support for their opinion from the text. Sometimes,  an interpretive question is given as well. At our follow-up meeting, we go over the homework and another discussion question. Sometimes, homework discussions have been so lively we don’t always make it to the discussion question.

The third grade group is working very hard on how to have a discussion--listening to someone else’s opinion before jumping in, talking one at a time, etc. They are learning there can be more than one interpretation to events in a story and that different interpretations can be equally valid.

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