Since this
was my first time doing Literature Circles I chose only one book
for the children to read, instead of having many different
groups reading different books. Now that I feel more comfortable
with Literature Circles and the children worked very well with
it I would try using more than one book at a time.
The book I
chose for the children to read was Abel’s Island by
William Steig. One of the
Extension Projects I wanted to do with the book was a timeline.
This book was excellent for this project.
The
children were put into literature groups. There were four
children in a group. I let them pick a partner and then I put
them into the final groups of four. I made sure that each group
had a strong reader. They would read orally in their groups two
chapters of the book. They would then use their Literature
Circle Role sheets that I obtained off the Internet. The
students would rotate their roles of Summarizer, Vocabulary
Finder, Question Writer, and Story Mapper each time they met.
After the children finished their written response they would
meet again to discuss and share their role sheet comments. I
found it very interesting to listen in on the groups. Stronger
students would help weaker ones find the answers to the
questions the group was discussing. I feel the children put a
lot more effort into their work knowing they were going to share
it with the members of their group.
After the
book was completed they each drew an illustration that they felt
showed an important part of the book. Along with their
illustration they had a caption to explain the picture.
As a
culmination project the children were required to do an
Extension Project. Some of the children worked alone and others
worked in groups. The projects handed in included board games,
bookmarks, postage stamps and CD covers. On the CD covers they
listed songs and their artist they felt went along with the
theme of the book.
The
Extension Project that we did together as a class I felt showed
they had understood the sequence of the story line. Each group
was to come up with a time line for the year the story took
place in. Then as a class we made one timeline with
Timeliner software.. It was
amazing how accurate they wanted to be and would look through
the book to make sure we had everything in order.