On her birthday, Scholastic has just announced that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling will be appearing in a webcast to launch a new reading club for young readers.

The Harry Potter Reading Club is a collaboration between Scholastic and educators, librarians, after-school program coordinators and parents “who want to organize a book club with access to all the tools they need to host a Harry Potter Reading Club and celebrate the joy of reading. The first 10,000 registrants for the Club will receive a welcome kit including bookmarks, stickers and nametags.”

The Club includes a comprehensive discussion guide for each of the seven Harry Potter novels. The guides provide questions to help club members start an insightful conversation about the themes and events in the books and, in certain instances, how the books may relate to readers’ own lives and the world today. Each month Scholastic will add new themed activities to complement the Reading Club discussions that will often relate to experiences on the Pottermore website.

J.K. Rowling’s webcast will be held October 11 at 5 p.m. GMT/12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT and hosted from her home in Edinburgh. It is the first time she’ll be answering questions “from children” since 2007 (in New York).

You can visit the Reading Club’s site to sign up and learn more. What do you think of this new idea from Scholastic?

We’ll of course be tuning in to the webcast and will hopefully get some interesting new details about the series from Rowling!