Rocket Champs by Niyatee Sharma is perfect for young readers who enjoy stories about STEM. It follows the timeless enemies-to-friends trope in a fun, believable way. I look forward to introducing this quick read to my book clubbers! Here’s what we’ll do as we read.
Things Going Wrong
Arjun feels like everything’s going wrong. His mother has banned experiments at home. Worse, he has to team up with the most annoying girl in school for a science project!
At my book club, we’ll use this as the prompt for a couple of exercises. One – how many synonyms do you know for the word “annoying”? And two, what does the most annoying day in the world look like to you? Write a journal entry!
Experiments
While I would have loved to make a rocket with my book clubbers, it’s challenging to do it online! I can’t monitor their experiments well, and I don’t want to imagine the kind of havoc it could create! Instead, we’ll try to do a couple of simple things. We’ll make a paper boat, and I’ll ask the children to see how it floats. I’d love also to see if my book clubbers can demonstrate something easy and safe!
Enemies to Friends
What is a trope? How can we use one when we write?
As creative writing is an integral part of Read, Write, Explore, we will spend one class exploring the enemies-to-friends trope and writing a story of our own following it!
Join a programme!
Read, Write, Explore is an ongoing reading programme that combines the joy of a book club with an introduction to creative writing.
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