What’s better than a good book? A good book shared with friends and family! This winter, encourage your young reader to create their very own Hot Cocoa Book Club. They’ll enjoy sharing fun stories, having great conversations, and cozying up during the chilliest season of the year.
A Hot Cocoa Book Club fosters shared reading experiences, encourages storytelling traditions, and offers thoughtful questions that bring books to life. From snowy evenings to rainy afternoons, it’s all about bonding over books and building lifelong reading habits.
Getting started is simple. With our easy-to-follow guide, invitation template, discussion guide, and curated book lists, your kid has everything they need to get the ball rolling. All they have to do is invite some members, pick a few books and questions, and start brewing some hot chocolate! Here’s how to get started:
Choose Which Book(s) to Read
You only need three things to run a successful Hot Cocoa Book Club: books, friends, and cocoa. Before kids do anything else, they’ll want to choose some possible book selections for your first meeting.
There are all kinds of ways to go about choosing titles. You can go with a general theme, such as winter stories or family books or action/adventure. You can focus on a character or series, like Clifford or the Baby-sitters Club or Who Would Win? Or your child can select a title that appeals to them from our curated list below.
Pro tip: When it comes to where your child reads, you can help them build a cozy book nook using things you already have around the house.
Free Invitation Template and Bookmark Printable!
Thanks to video calling technology, you don’t even need to be in the same ZIP code to join together for reading fun. So, feel free to cast a wide net when inviting members. Your child can send emails or even handwritten invitations to grandparents in different time zones, aunts and uncles in far-off towns, even family friends in other countries. If you can coordinate a time, you can make it happen!
Feel free to adapt the following invitation template for your needs:
Hi [NAME],
I’m super excited to invite you to my Hot Cocoa Book Club. We’ll be reading [fill in your chosen book or theme here].
We will have our first meeting on [fill in date].
I hope you can join us!
Love,
[YOUR NAME]
As an added bonus, include our free printable steaming hot cocoa bookmark as a gift to your new club members!
Discussion Questions for Book Club Gatherings
We have ready-to-use questions perfect for discussions over hot cocoa. Try some of these or encourage your young reader to come up with their own:
- What genre is this story part of and what other books have you read in this genre?
- What did you think about the book’s ending?
- Who was your favorite character?
- Who changed the most in the story and how?
- What was the sweetest part of the story in your opinion?
- What would you change about this story, if anything?
- Was was the biggest challenge facing the hero of the story and how did they deal with it?
- Was there a villain of the story? Did they have a good side too or were they purely evil?
- Did anything about this book remind you of something that happened in your real life?
- If you were going to write a story in this genre, what would it be like?
Ready to get reading? Choose a book from the list below or drop by The Scholastic Store to search by age, subject, character, series, and more.
