lit circles

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lit circles
By srw

Here is an example of my daily reading schedule. I had a chart on the board that divided out what each group was to do on each day.
G1 G2 G3 G4 G5

Mon JC meet WR
LA read
Tues meet WR LA read JC
Wed WR LA read JC meet
Thurs LA read JC meet WR
Fri read JC meet WR LA

JC--job cards (I had these copied and laminated. Each time each member would take a card and do the sheet that corresponded to it. They typically had 45 minutes to

do this. If they finished early they could work on other work, or read their self selected book) Notice this always comes after their day of reading. They would do the job cards based on the pages they read the day before.

MEET--meet with me and the rest of the group members. Notice this always comes after their day of job cards.

LA--Literature activity...venn diagram of characters, an acrostic of character names, self connection to a particular passage, etc.

WR--Weekly Reader (or Time for Kids) whatever your school/system subscribes too.

Read--silently or group read the next 20 pages.

The jobs
Discussion Director--Comes up with 5 (in depth) questions about the pages read the day before

Word Wizard--Writes and defines any words that are unfamiliar. Also writes a sentence with them and documents the page the word is from.

Connector--picks a passage and makes a text to text, text to self, or text to world connection.

Illustrator--picks a passage and draws a picture. Writes a paragraph explaining the drawing.

If you have more than 4 kids in a group, more than one can do the same job. It is interesting to get the different perspectives.

I primarily used the books listed in the post above.
As for reading each day...we had Lit. circle time (Reading Instruction) for 45 min.-1hr. daily.
Then we had read aloud time (10-15min) daily and SSR (sustained silent reading) for 30min daily. During SSR they read their own book. They also were to read 20 min a night. (My school focused a lot on reading!!!)

Somehow, I also plugged AR into the whole process. Not as much as I would have liked (it was new to the school last year) but it worked. I set individual goals for them and they worked to achieve them.
As long as they were reading and progressing though I didn't "grade" them on their AR process.

I hope that I have made this clearer to you. I might have just confused you more. Feel free to ask more questions if I did.