I did have time to add something to my Teachers Pay Teachers store today... Literature Circle role sheets!
Literature Circles are one of the (unfortunately few) concrete ideas that I learned about in college, and actually do use every year. For those of you who don't know, Literature Circles are a way to organize a novel study which encourages students to engage in authentic conversation about a book. As we know, as adults we rarely answer meaningless questions about the books we read... but instead, we discuss what we read in book clubs, with friends, or just in conversation with others.
With the Literature Circles format, each student has a role that they fulfill while reading the novel (or portion of a novel), and then they contribute to the conversation from the viewpoint of that role. There are lots of different roles that I've seen out there, but the ones that I stick to are...
Story Summarizer (this person summarizes the characters, setting, and plot of the reading)
Word Watcher (this role involves looking up definitions of vocabulary words from the reading)
Question Creator (this student needs to create and answer thought-provoking questions about the reading)
Creative Connector (this person comes up with a few different text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections about the reading)
Imaginative Illustrator (to draw a picture of how they imagined a scene from the book)
...and, of course you need a Circle Supervisor (to keep the conversation focused and moving, and to make sure that everyone is participating equally)
The goal is for students to eventually be able to hold a meaningful conversation, with everyone participating equally, without teacher guidance... eventually. It usually takes quite a bit of practice to get my students there... we did one round of Literature Circles with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (we used a condensed version of the Literature Circle worksheets, which is a FREEBIE that you can find here)... One of my main focuses the first time around with my students was building on what the last person said, rather than each person just saying their two cents without anyone else really paying attention. But once you see that the students are really able to dig into a cool book, it is really cool to see!
Next up, my students are going to tackle The Giver. We're going whole hog this time - the full role sheets, and hopefully I truly will be handing off the conversation to be fully student-led! (We'll see... it's not always easy for me to fully let go of the control! ha)
