Circle Up-Martina Bex

This presentation was how to use literature circles in the TPRS classroom.  There are a lot of steps that I hope I can make clear, but the end product was really cool.

First, find a short text of about 1-1 1/2 pages.  It should use interesting language and be thought provoking.  The example she used was a video about the Happy Man.  He was so happy, but he wanted to be like everyone else (sad), so he tried to be sad, but everything that he did made him happy, and when he did have moments of sadness, that's what he wanted, so he became happy again.  Very complex ideas.

First, you do an intro of the vocabulary and explore the themes with PQA.  This would probably be a class period, depending on the complexity of the reading.

Next, create an embedded reading.  You can read this whole class, circle it, PQA it, ask comprehension questions, etc.  Just like you would for a normal embedded reading.  Make sure that if the ideas in the reading are complex, you should simplify to vocabulary so the kids aren't too overwhelmed.  In this part, only use the simplest reading.

Now, you're ready for your first exercise as a literature circle.  With the second reading, take turns in your circle (about 8-10 students) reading the text aloud, but only read a line of text (not a sentence that ends in a period, but where the text ends on the line.  The rationale of this is to get students to hear the story differently so as to get a different meaning (maybe).  Then, the teacher reads a second time and each student underlines the words that are striking to them.  During this process, the teacher can stop and PQA or ask comprehension questions, but it needs to be clear.  Martina said, "Let's pause...(PQA)...and now continue..."  Then, the teacher reads it a second time, and this time, when she says a word that I've underlined, I say it with her.  Because all students are doing this, some words will be read by 15 people at the same time, while others may just have one or two.  This was a pretty cool exercise, and just think of how many reps you're getting!  You can also have students write a quick summary in English of each paragraph at some point during this exercise.

Next, work with the 3rd level of the reading.  BEFORE the students read this version, the teacher reads it aloud (students are just listening) and they write down any words that jump out at them.  They then choose two of those (can be a short phrase or sentence) and edit what they wrote down so that it is perfect (exactly as it is written in the 3rd version).  Once every student has two perfect phrases, the literature circle does a "choral poem."  Go around the circle and have everyone read their first phrase, and then go around a second time and read the 2nd thing they wrote down.  This was very powerful and cool and we were able to see some patterns in what was interesting to others.

Now, we were ready to interact with the authentic resource (in this case, the video called El Hombre Feliz).  Because this was a video, you can do anything that you would normally do with a movie talk.  We had a transcript of this, making it a reading and not just a listening exercise. 

Now, we went back to the 3rd version and the two interesting ideas that we had written down.  Of those two, we chose the one that was MOST interesting to us and wrote about it for 2-5 minutes (we took 2 minutes for a time constraint).  Then, we got back into our literature circle and someone re-read the text aloud.  When we got to a word/phrase that someone had written about, they would interject and read what they had written (kind of like a meandering thought).  Students don't have to share their writing if they don't want to, and if two people wrote about the same phrase, they just start when the other finishes.  Again, very cool to experience.  The teacher would then collect the writings (students write YES or NO on the bottom to indicate whether they can be shared with the class), type them up and they would be a reading for the next day.

EXTENSION ACTIVITIES: the idea is that this could be for an authentic piece of literature.  Think Sartre or Camus or something pretty heady.  Martina said that she has used The House on Mango Street.  So you should be able to find authentic news stories, a biography of the author, interviews, etc.  Martina said that the goal is to use the one piece of literature for 1 1/2-2 weeks.  By the end of that time, students should have a very clear idea of what the piece is about and how the language shapes that message.

Really cool stuff!!