The cover of Monster Locker by Jorge Aguirre & Andrés Vera Martínez. A boy presses his back against a school locker, with colorful supernatural creatures bursting out of the door.
Posted in daily blog

Friday, July 11 – Monster Locker

Posted on by thaliabookclubcamp

Happy Friday, my fellow bookworms! This week has positively flown by in a rush of zine-making and fossil-tracking and play-writing and rounds of Uno and subway singalong sessions, with visits from a revolving door of absolutely incredible authors who shared their passion for literature with us. I can’t believe Week 1 is over already! But it was a wonderful end to our time together, with not one but TWO special guests to discuss today’s featured book. It was a landmark day in Thalia Kids Book Club Camp history – read on for the full recap!

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Cover of West of the Sea by Stephanie Willing. A girl with light skin and short brown hair stands in the foreground beside a river with a sunset behind her. Ghostly rainbow-colored silhouettes of prehistoric creatures surround her.
Posted in daily blog

Thursday, July 10 – West of the Sea

Posted on by thaliabookclubcamp

Day Four at camp was all about fossils, both the physical remnants on earth and the memories they carry. These memories feature heavily in Stephanie Willing’s West of the Sea, in which the protagonist Haven is able to see ghostly echoes of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that once roamed the earth. These ghosts, Haven thinks at one point in the novel, are “the earth remembering” what it once had, in a time long before humans. 

In that vein, we started this morning with an acting activity where campers were asked to devise a scene based around the history or “memories” of objects brought from counselor Eleanor’s grandmother’s home. The resulting scenes were excellent and varied: a shark that turns into a mermaid! Two campers playing the two sides of a coin! A Christmas tree that walks off on its own! Another, different Christmas tree holding markers as lightbulbs! But all had one character in common: Eleanor’s grandmother, of course. 

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Wednesday, July 9 – A Perfect Mistake

Posted on by thaliabookclubcamp

Today’s featured book was A Perfect Mistake by Melanie Conklin. The book is a mystery in which many lies prevent the narrator from figuring out the truth, so we started out our Wednesday by playing some classic Two Truths and a Lie. We learned some pretty outrageous things about each other…did you know that camper Ellie once ate a rock? Campers also had the option to tell us Two Lies and a Truth instead. Only one of these things about camper Wells is true: can you guess which one it is? Is he a lucid dreamer, did he get a perfect score on the math state test, or did he once eat a whole grocery-store-size slice of blue cheese in a single sitting? The answer will be revealed at the bottom of the blog post!

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Posted in FYI

All About Week 1!

Posted on by thaliabookclubcamp

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another summer at the Thalia Kids Book Club Camp! Whether it’s your first year with us or you’re a tried-and-true camp veteran, we are so glad to have you with us to talk books and flex our creative muscles together. This daily blog will recap all the goings-on at camp once we officially get started on July 7, but in the meantime, if you’re just dying to learn a little more about our featured books for the summer, this post is for you. Read on for a preview of our fantastic Week 1 titles!

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