Literature Circle - Key Features of Literature Circles

Key Features of Literature Circles

  1. Children choose their own reading materials.
  2. Small temporary groups are formed, based on book choice.
  3. Different groups read different books
  4. Groups meet on a regular predictable schedule.
  5. Students use written or drawn notes to guide both their reading and discussion.
  6. Discussion topics come from the students
  7. Group meetings aim to be open, natural conversations. Often the conversations digress to topics relating to the students or loosely to the books, but should eventually return to the novel.
  8. The teacher serves as a facilitator, observer, listener and often a fellow reader, alongside the students. The teacher is not an instructor.
  9. Students are given roles or jobs to complete for each group meeting.
  10. The teacher should model how students should facilitate each role or job.
  11. Evaluation is by teacher observation and student self-evaluation and should also include extension projects.
  12. A spirit of playfulness and fun pervades the room.
  13. New groups form around new reading choices.

(Daniels, 1994)

Discussion prompts can be given by the teacher to encourage a direction for the students' responses, such as "How does the setting affect the characters?" "What are alternative solutions to the character's conflicts in the text?" "What connections can you make with regard to the character's situation(s)?"

Read more about this topic:  Literature Circle

Famous quotes containing the words key, features, literature and/or circles:

    “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key to that era.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    ““It looks as if
    Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
    And its eyes shut with overeagerness
    To see what people found so interesting
    In one another, and had gone to sleep
    Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
    Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
    Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    “I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.”
    —Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)

    “Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
    —Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)