Transcript

Literature circles are a great teaching tool. It helps facilitate group discussions with small groups of children who have read the same novel. And what I do is, at the beginning of the term I do assessments on the children so I know what they're reading ability is so that I know I'm not assigning a novel that's too hard for them. I chose five novels for our first literature circle study that involve our social studies unit. So these represent different cultures in the First Nations, so that when we actually get to studying First Nations and talking about it in the class each group has their own expertise that they can talk about, what the way of life of the culture was, what kind of houses they lived in, so everybody has something to say. 

How do you run a literature circle? First of all, you have all of the five books posted, and then you make sure you divide the book into fairly equal sections and you assign a date. I like to give students about two weeks to read the text because I find you build momentum as you go through. One of the really important tips that you need to keep in mind is that the students are going to have job cards, so that every time they meet they're going to be doing a different job. They really need to understand what is entailed in each of these jobs. One of the ways I like to teach how to do each of these jobs is to give them a familiar text, so I've chosen The Cat in the Hat, I read the text, and then we analyze it. So I ask the children to listen to the story and imagine that they are the Discussion Director. If you were the Discussion Director then you have to generate really good questions that would help facilitate discussions in your group when they meet. So what might be a great question? The students will say, which character are you most like? They can generate four or five interesting questions that generate discussion. The Word Wizard is looking at words that are unfamiliar in the text and ways to teach it to the rest of the group. The Summarizer is basically telling you just an outline of the story using their own words. The Literary Luminary is a great job because the Literary Luminary is trying to find aspects of the text that are particularly interesting. So if I was the Literary Luminary for this book, I would pick a great passage that the flow of the language is fast and then it's slow, and I would read it to my group. The Connector is trying to find connections, so the point where the children realize there's such a mess in the house, have you ever felt a time when things were so overwhelming in your life? 

So those are examples of how to teach something using a really accessible book to teach something that's fairly complicated. Each of the children are given their own package, and the package has the five pages in it. Each child starts on a different page, and then when they meet again, after they've read the next section of the text, they just move on to the next page. And that way, everybody works through the book, and everybody reads the book, and by the end you have to actually get the students to put little page notes in at the end of each of the sections. They'll be so enthusiastic about reading the book by the end they'll want to just pretend it's not there and they'll want to finish the book. 

However, another function of the Post-It notes is to have children write down as they're reading, and I find that if they read something right away and they make a note and stick it in their book they'll remember it, and they'll be able to bring it to their group and discuss it. Another thing you want to talk about, when you're doing Literature Circles is how do you listen to the other people in your group. Make sure you have your knees so that everybody is facing in towards each other, make sure you're making eye contact, when it's your turn to speak make sure you're making eye contact with the other people in the group, and make sure that you are an active listener when other people are talking. 

Literature circles are essentially book clubs for kids. And using these supportive jobs helps scaffold their learning so that they can talk intelligently and insightfully about books and listen to the ideas of others well.

Related References