Literature Circles for Second Grade

Over the last two weeks, I tried my first literature circles as a second grade teacher.  This can be a daunting task with younger kids, but with some research and pre-planning, I thought that it went pretty well.  One of the keys to its success was that I had kids practice all of the "jobs" beforehand with shorter stories in our reading series before tackling a chapter book in small groups.   With my small class of nine, I allowed the students to choose between two pre-selected Magic Tree House books. These worked great because they are short and were high interest reads.  I divided the tasks of the literature circles into five jobs which rotated on a daily basis.  My adorable models are showing off the necklaces I made to identify who had each job for the day. The jobs I assigned are as follows:

Word Wizard: I chose two words from each daily reading assignment and the Word Wizard had to use the dictionary to define the words.

Summarizer:  It was the job of this student to write a brief summary of the daily reading assignment.

Discussion Director: It was the job of this student to write down at least three interesting questions about the chapter to discuss within the reading group.  I found that at this age level, it was difficult for them to come up with more probing questions beyond, "what was the setting, characters, etc."  Next time, I will provide a list of sample questions to engage the students in deeper thinking.

Story Connector: This student had to think of how that chapter relates to something else they have read or done.  The purpose of this job is to connect what we are reading to other literature or real life experiences.  This was the only worksheet that I made myself and you are free to print it for your own personal use.  All other resources that I use come from copyrighted teaching resources.

Lastly, it was the job of the illustrator to draw a picture of what they think the selection might have looked like.

After the first night, I assigned two chapters per day.  I gave students plenty of time in class to finish their job.  The next day each student shared their work in the order listed above and was assigned a new task.  Before completing a job, the student had to read the daily assignment at least twice.  I had a copy of one of the books on CD and placed my struggling readers in this group. Over time, there is probably a lot of tweaking I will do to improve my literature circles, but the class had a great time with it and I feel it was a successful first attempt.