Literature Circles - ELA Lesson Plans #8

Before we get into this week's lessons I want to answer a couple of questions from readers.  How long are my shared reading lessons?  Well it all depends, on average they are 20-30 minutes.  Some years they're longer, this year they are are usually around 20 minutes.   When you have a class that spans a huge gap in reading levels, reading time is best spent in guided reading.  Another question was; Do I differentiate? YES! Every one of the lessons in my classroom is  differentiated and we differentiate everything from reading materials, support tools to workstations, etc.  Some weeks you will see a very low lexile level in a text that I've differentiated for students while we kept the response for higher kids pretty challenging.  Feel free to email me with more questions that you may have or leave them in the comments below.  You can find the lesson plan pages at A Modern Teacher.

Learning is being kicked into overdrive this week.  So far we have covered all of the basic standards in depth and from the foundation up.  Students should be able to hold reading conversations that would blow your mind.  They can ask and answer questions.  They can find key details, do character analysis, etc.  Now it's time to give them ownership of their learning with your guidance.  We are moving into Literacy Circles.  We are going to start with text that we read together in class and end the week with self selected texts.  Students will begin by completing posters that retell the story with the lesson and character traits.  Once they understand what to do, they will select what goes on their posters at the end of the week.  I will edit this post later on to add anchor charts, but our guidelines are as follows.

Literature Circle Jobs
-Reader
-Writer
-Illustrator
-Questioner
(jobs will change daily to help students)

Literature Circle Options
-predict
-infer
-discuss character traits
-ask and answer questions
-discuss character reactions
-retell the story
-discuss the story's lesson

Literature Circle Rules
-Everyone participates
-Everyone listens respectfully
-Everyone leads parts of the discussion

This week there will be no writing lessons.  We will be conferencing and editing our last writing assessment.