Literature Circles During Daily 5 (for my conference bloggers)

One new literature strategy that I've begun using more intentionally this year is Literature Circles (aka "Book Clubs). I should begin by saying that I had this group of 3rd graders last year as 2nd graders so was able to spend the entire year setting up the expectations for Daily 5 and practicing each element (especially Read to Self and Read to Someone) until we had them down pat!

With that in place last year, we were able to spend a few of the first weeks of school practicing and reteaching, and we were off and running! I saw this as an opportunity to go deeper with my guided reading groups...

While I've done guided reading for the past 4 years, it's taken many shapes and forms and (other than implementing my fluency research last year) I've never really felt like the students enjoyed this time or really grew as readers because of our group work. I wanted to change that.

I decided to try using literature circles with my highest readers as I felt that they'd be a good "test group" and one that could handle the increased responsibility during reading. Here's a quick run down:

-My group consisted of 6 readers (rigby levels between Q and U)
-This group so happened to have 3 boys and 3 girls so I split it into two mini-groups who still met at the same time
-With the help of our media specialist, the girls selected 3 copies of the same book that they all wanted to read and the boys did the same.
-Once they had the book, I introduced one role at a time. These roles were:

• Book Club Leader-this person had a checklist of meeting "duties" to be addressed each time they met to discuss
• Question Asker- as they're reading this person was to come up with at least 3 questions ("thick questions" that caused them to think outside the text)
• Word Wizard-find at least 3 interesting words, denote the page number and state why they chose the word
• Connection Maker-as they're reading, make at least 3 text connections to themselves, the world around them or another text they've read
• Artful Artist-after reading their selected pages, they are to draw a picture that was created in their mind at some point during the reading

Each student was given a role to complete while they read a selected amount of pages. The next time we got together the students would use their role to guide the discussion and then decide on the next set of pages to read. 

Because this was new to my students, I acted as the book club leader for the first few weeks so they could see what a book group should look like and know how to take the discussion deeper than simply reading what they'd found. 

I was VERY impressed with how well they took on their responsibilities and by the 3rd week they were exchanging phone numbers so they could call each other at home while they were reading (SERIOUSLY!!?!...it was definitely a teacher moment :)

While I'm no expert on Literature Circles, please click here for more resources to implement this wonderful strategy into your daily reading block!