If you are unfamiliar with the book, Restart is about a boy who falls off the roof of his house and gets amnesia. As he gains his memory back, he learns he isn’t quite the person he thought he was. Great coming of age topics like bullying, friendships, and family relationships are addressed. There is a wealth of material for classroom or book club study. Restart also lends itself to some great STEM activities. One session we focused on the brain. We researched how the brain controls the body, how memory works, and what happens when a person has amnesia. The students were fascinated (and a little grossed out) by their new knowledge. One student recorded on our message board they discovered the  brain was “weird and wonderful.” Another student said their brain was “squishy and smart.” While a third  said they “had no idea their brain worked like that.” In another session, instead of just focussing on bullying, we looked at the specific problem of the role of technology and bullying. There is a great interactive  Nearpod presentation that is ready-made that walks students through dealing with cyberbullying. You can also have students share what they think cyberbullying looks like to them. (Where do they see it? Who is involved?) When they recognize cyberbullying, what should they do? Help students brainstorm ways to report cyberbullying to a trusted adult. The Stop Bullying website is a great resource for information on cyberbullying and prevention. For our last session, readers made new book covers and recorded book reviews using green screens, remove.bg, and iMovie. Flipgrid, Clips, and DoInk are other apps that also work well for recording and editing book reviews. Readers were able to express their feelings in a less traditional way than a written book report. Throughout our Restart journey, we used other tools like hyperdocs and community message boards to keep track of what we were learning and our discoveries.  These were always accessible to the students in our online learning platform so they could ask each other questions or record thoughts outside of club time. Some quick ideas for using STEM activities in your book club or book study: