Many of us at Explorer have begun combining literature circles with the icons of depth and complexity. We find that it makes the literature circle discussions more rich and interesting and meaningful.
Every teacher does literature circles slightly differently, but the basic idea is that small groups of students (usually four or five) read a book, which often is of their own choosing. Each student has a job – some traditional jobs are: Discussion Director; Word Wizard (finds challenging vocabulary); Literary Luminary (finds interesting passages); Summarizer; and Illustrator.
When we integrate the icons of depth and complexity, we change these jobs somewhat. The discussion director is still responsible for guiding discussion, but also has the role of identifying icons for the group to look for, such as patterns or trends. Since Power is an overarching theme that we are studying all year in fifth grade, we have one job that we call “power professional” – she or he is looking throughout the text for power relationships and reference. We sometimes have a job related to parallels – that student’s role is to look for parallels in the text, and we talk about deep and shallow parallels; parallels within the text and parallels from the text to the world or to a person’s life. Another favorite job is one that looks for ethics and ethical dilemmas; and another which we often use is the multiple perpectives finder.
Since these jobs are not the same as the ones the children may be used to, we start off by modeling the whole process. We read the first book out loud and we model the jobs one by one, so everyone in the class takes that job for the week and we have full class discussions on whatever the role may be – finding parallels, or trends, or ethical issues.
When we get to doing the actual literature circles, the students choose from four books, and they get to rank their choices from 1 to 4, so not everyone gets their first choice, but we do our best. We ask them to figure out their own jobs and their own schedules, with input from us. We actually make it a problem of the day, i.e. they have a certain number of pages and chapters, and a certain amount of time, and they come up with a schedule for how much they are going to do each week. Students are then responsible for sticking to the reading schedule they create and they meet weekly to have a student-led book talk. During this discussion time students share their weekly findings and connections to the icons of depth and complexity.
The board games were a culminating project. Though the literature circle process itself is wonderful for deepening their analytical skills, we also like to do a final project of some kind. In previous years, students have presented in some format, such as a talk show or a skit, or we’ve done scrapbooks about characters or themes. The board games was one of best. It was challenging for them to use the jobs and the icons and to see how it could relate to a game. We talked as a class about the structure of games and their purpose. In the end they were incredibly successful in creating games that were fun and also incorporated all their elements of analysis. The children loved the games and wanted to play them all year.
