Sure as the full moon, it happens once a month: book-club order time. As you fill out all those forms and collect money like a bank teller, you may wonder: Are worth the trouble?

The teachers in a study we just completed say yes - if you use the process as a teaching tool.

School book clubs such as Scholastic, Troll, and Trumpet have been a routine part of many elementary classrooms for decades. But the advent of literature-based reading and writing programs has moved book clubs toward center stage in the language arts curriculum.

As teacher-educators and researchers, we became increasingly curious about book clubs as teachers repeatedly mentioned them when discussing their language arts programs. Our interest led us to a series of studies investigating the use of school book clubs. For highlights of our research, see the boxes on pages 46 and 47. Here are some of the practices we gleaned.

TEACHER, WHAT BOOKS SHOULD I PICK?

Students today are spending more time on independent reading, making their own choices about the books they read. Examining information about books, making predictions about their value for a given purpose, and narrowing down available options are all strategic elements of choice. Here's how to use school book clubs to help children develop these critical lifelong skills.

* Help students build on the familiar. Our research showed that students purchase authors, genres, and topics to which they have been exposed in the classroom. Teachers frequently review items on the book-club order form, guiding students to draw on what they know about literature to make predictions about what the new materials might be like. This process of reviewing possible book selections helps build students' literary repertoires and influence their personal tastes.

* Provide models for choosing. Some of the teachers we observed model strategies for book selection by thinking aloud as they read the blurbs and consider each book for the classroom library. They might say, for example, "We could use this book to add to our collection about whales" or "This is by Beverly Cleary. Most of us find her books to be fun and easy to read. It might be a good choice this time."

* Highlight special choices. Some teachers highlight on the order forms the books they think students might be interested in. For example, in one school where a fifth grader had recently been killed in an accident, the teacher highlighted the book On My Honor, which deals with the death of a young person.

* Teach comparison shopping. A fifth-grade teacher we observed introduced consumerism into the process by having her students compare the prices of the same book offered by more than one book club in the same month.

MY BOOKS,

YOUR BOOKS, OUR BOOKS

Our research showed that teachers can make book clubs beneficial to everyone in the class - the students who are able to order for themselves every time and those who never can. Here's how.

* Use bonus points to cover the class. Some of the teachers we interviewed were concerned that many children could not participate in the book clubs because of parental refusal or lack of funds. Many teachers use bonus points to purchase books for these children. The teacher helps the child select books much as a parent might.

* Reach out to parents. Some teachers talk about the book-club process with parents at open house early in the year. They stress to parents the importance of building a book collection at home, but are careful to emphasize that book-club participation is strictly voluntary. They explain to parents that school book clubs offer an easy and inexpensive way to obtain books, but that the clubs should be used in combination with other resources, such as the public library, book fairs, and bookstores.

* Let everyone pick the classroom books. Involving all children in the selection of books for the classroom collection is another way that teachers try to bring everyone into the process. When they share in the decision making about books for the classroom, even children who don't place personal orders feel like book-club participants.

* Build participation in the classroom collection. Teachers continue developing the sense of whole-class participation once the book orders arrive. After children who ordered books for themselves talk with the class about what they purchased and why, teachers call on other children to share the books ordered for the classroom collection. Each child gives the title and author of a book and, with the help of the teacher, recalls why this particular book was ordered. New books for the classroom collection are always placed on the library table for a day or so before being shelved. In this way, students can peruse them at their leisure.

MANY THINGS

TO MANY STUDENTS

Providing interesting books on a variety of topics and reading levels is one of the greatest challenges facing elementary schools today. Because book clubs offer a wide range of subjects, genres, authors, and cultural viewpoints, many teachers have come to rely on them as a way to meet this challenge. Here's how to make the most of this variety.

* Think diversity when choosing the class collection. Students' reading abilities vary widely within a group. They can even vary within an individual student. The teachers in our study addressed this by making eclectic choices - from picture books to chapter books, classics to contemporary, fiction to nonfiction - for the class from the monthly book-club order. You can be guided by your students' particular interests and still choose books that work for the widest variety of readers.

* Take advantage of theme-based and content-area collections. In support of the growing trend toward theme-based instruction, school book clubs have made an effort to respond to teachers' requests for more sets of books related to a particular topic, author, or genre. Use of school book clubs to provide multiple copies of a particular book or set of books related to a content area topic, a specific literary genre, or by a favorite author was very common among the teachers we observed.

* Get students in the multiple-source habit. Children who are enthusiastic about a topic and know a great deal about it are likely to read that material with increased ease and understanding. The key to keeping them challenged and helping them develop critical reading skills is to encourage them to seek multiple sources for exploring a topic that fascinates them.

* Find new ways to bridge curriculum areas. Trade books can be the glue that holds together an integrated curriculum. For example, one fifth-grade teacher used the book clubs to fuel her class's study of both the Civil War and biographies. She ordered several biographies of Abraham Lincoln, which students read and compared with historical fiction and nonfiction as they built background knowledge about this tumultuous period in our history. Then they segued from the Lincoln biographies into an in-depth study of biography as a literary form. Their teacher read other book-club biographies aloud and each student was required to read at least one independently, focusing on what makes a good biography. Eventually, each student wrote a biography of an elderly person of his or her choice, using interviews, real artifacts, and library research.

* Mix and match the book clubs. Many of the teachers we interviewed are extremely creative in the ways they mix and match book clubs to meet their curricular requirements. For example, a teacher who wanted to acquire all the "Little House" books put in place a strategy for acquiring them over several months with cash and bonus points. For a good selection of books about insects, another teacher searched the tides of several book clubs and ordered accordingly. Teachers agreed that a little foresight and effort really paid off.

TIMELY RESEARCH

ON SCHOOL

BOOK CLUBS

Book clubs have been classroom phenomena for as long as we can remember - yet their impacts on instruction and on children's literacy development has never been fully explored - until now. Our study, which was funded in part by the M. R. Robinson Foundation, has three parts:

* A national survey of teachers, students, and parents in kindergarten through eighth grade - in urban, suburban, and rural communities - to learn about their experiences with and views on school book clubs.

* An intensive yearlong case study of 12 children - in grades 1, 3, and 5, and in basal and literature-based classrooms - focusing on their school book-club purchases, their classroom literary experiences, and the ways in which their teachers use school book clubs in their literacy programs.

* An examination of a year's offerings of the three major book-club publishers to determine the nature and range of materials available through the book clubs.

MANAGING INDEPENDENT READING: THE ONE-TO-ONE CONFERENCE