Literature Circles

Students will learn and practice comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and vocabulary acquisition strategies and skills in a collaborative environment.  Students will be placed into small reading groups and assigned with a book that is a good fit for them to read at an instructional level.  Students will be assigned a number of pages to read and a meeting date.  During the meeting, the student is expected to have read the selection chosen by the group, kept a sequence chain of narrative elements as they read, and then share a written response to the reading in the form of their Literature Circle Role.

The Literature Circle Roles are as follows:  

Summarizer - summarizes only the highly important narrative elements of the reading selection for the group

Connector - produces a text to self, text to text, or text to media connection while comparing and contrasting the connection to the       narrative elements of the reading selection for the group

Character Critic - creates a character analysis by describing to the group how the characters in a story change as the story moves       towards its conclusion

Questioner - creates a "thick" question that enriches and expands the understanding of the groups comprehension of the reading selection, shares the question with the group, and then answers the question for and with the group

Literary Luminary - creates a list of figurative words or phrases the author used to enhance visualization or produce deeper meaning   and shares the list with the group.

Illustrator - synthesizes visualizations of the narrative elements while reading and illustrates them to the group

Predictor - predicts what will happen next and supports the prediction with narrative elements that were read in the selection and     shares the prediction and supports with the group

Word Wizard - enriches and enhances students vocabulary by identifying interesting or unknown words in the reading selection, uses   context clues to guess at the definition, and then the dictionary (online dictionary) definition with the group