I'm wondering if anyone has any great resources for literature circles. I feel that I don't know how to do them very well and my students certainly don't know how to do them either. I'd like to teach a unit on how to do literature circles.
It might just be two weeks or a week for the whole class and more weeks for the groups that will do literature circles.
I'd like to teach this to my 3rd and 4th graders who are above or not extremely below level. All the kids who are at a L or higher I believe would benefit from thinking deeply about their reading and discussing it.
I do work with students who live in poverty, which brings up some particular needs for maintaining class routines, which for many students is very foreign to home life. For this reason, I will limit having them meet without me. I did have them sit as a group to discuss and then write the questions I gave them to discuss. This was challenging to them because 1) I hadn't taught them how to do it and 2) some of the students, especially the high reading 3rd graders, struggled to write their ideas down, which of course led to off task behavior while I was doing guided reading.
I was thinking I could make it more of a cooperative group in that only one person has to write and everyone has a specific task and I could teach this structure to the whole class to use on occasion. Science comes to mind.
Thanks for any thoughts.
CCG