My dad had a fantastic birthday and he really liked the cupcakes. They were so good! I do wish the cupcake cake had come out a bit better.Those are really hard to make, unless you have a good way to smush all of the cupcakes together, so there are no holes. My solution to the holey problem was gummy worms, lots and lots of gummy worms. I think it came out okay. :D
Today's post is going to delve into some more teachery! Literature Circles.
My Young Adult Literature class last semester had seven lit circles over the course of the semester, this gave us the chance to read seven different young adult books. It also gave us a chance to try out the roles and the activity for ourselves, so we would know what it was like before we assigned this to our own students.
The first thing my professor did was give us a list of books. She had split each lit circle into a different genre. Each genre list contained 5 to 7 books.
Our first literature circle genre was "Classics", the books included were:
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Now the way that my professor had us pick our books was pretty cool, she had brought in copies of each book and had us do a "book tasting". We were to look at the covers, read the back summary and then rate each book 1-6, 1 being our first choice to read and so on.
This is what the form looked like:
Really simple, title in one column, any notes you may have while choosing and then your ranking. We did this for each lit circle and she collected the forms and then assigned our groups based on how many people chose which books.
There were only 7 people in our class, so more often than not we got our first or second choice.
Once we got our assigned book, we split into our groups and began assigning each other our "roles".
Harvey Daniels wrote our textbook on Lit Circles, it is called: "Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups". This is the book you need if you want to do literature circles in your classroom, he goes over the history, the roles and the various activities and tools you need to do literature circles well.
The roles are:
Discussion Director - Leads the discussion
Illuminator - Picks passages from the text to "illuminate"
Illustrator - Draws a picture based on a scene or theme from the book to share
Connector - Connects concepts in book to real-life
Word Watcher - Looks for interesting/new words to define and share
Summarizer - Summarizes what was read. (We didn't use this one in our own circles)
Since our class was so small, our groups ranged from 3 to 4 people, so we had to combine or leave out some roles. We always had a discussion director and an illustrator, but illuminator and connector were are other two favorite roles.
We were given a week or so to read our book after we assigned our roles and were told what our book was.
I was the Connector for "Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse, for the first lit circle.
I thought about doing reviews for my seven lit circle books, but that would be long for a single post, so I'm going to do some book reviews later on this month.
For now here are the other genres and books we got to choose from, along with the book I read, so you know the reviews to look out for. If you see any books you would like me to read and review, please let me know! :D
Adolescent Lives and Adventures
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork
Deliver us from Evie by M.E. Kerr
Perfect by Ellen Hopkins
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher (Read)
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Historical Fiction
Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelson (Read)
Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli
Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko
Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
Strings Attached by Judy Blundell
Nonfiction/Memoir
Jesusland by Julia Scheeres
Claudette Colvin - Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo by Zlata Fillipovic (Read)
Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos
Into the Unknown: How Great Explorers Found their Way by Land, Sea and Air by Stewart Ross
Science Fiction/Fantasy
Unwind by Neal Shusterman (Read)
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
Feed by M.T. Anderson
The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson
Across the Universe by Beth Revis
Verse Novel
Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson (Read)
All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg
Your Own, Sylvia by Stephanie Hemphill
Witness by Karen Hesse
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff
Graphic/Multi-Modal Form Novel
Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (Read)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm
Monster by Walter Dean Myers
After we had read our assigned book, our professor had us do an on-going activity called "Think-Tac-Toe". There were nine squares and in each square was an activity, we had to choose one activity for each book we read. We were not allowed to repeat any activities.
This is what that looked like:
Many of these activities were a lot of fun, especially making a soundtrack, podcast and found poem. Since we could only use each one once, we had to be sure to pick the perfect one for each book.
Now in a regular classroom, literature circles are usually done once a quarter, students meet once a week to discuss a book and as a group they decide how far they are going to read each week. I like the responsibility this places on students, and I think as a teacher, doing an activity like this frees you to have in depth discussions with small groups of students. This is a GREAT formative assessment.
Well I think that is all I have to say about lit circles, I do have one request, if anyone is a pro at Blogger and knows how to change the format of the blog, please let me know. I have some questions about making my blog a bit more fun. I also hate the fact I can't post bigger versions of pictures, without it looking all ugly. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Until next time!
-Laura
