CCSS Literature Circles

I love using literature circles in the classroom because they build students' motivation to read and helps them become life-long readers. But, I hate literature circle role sheets….copying them, keeping up with them, and grading them give me a headache! So I decided to create simple job cards for my literature circle meetings. Each card tells students what to do to prepare for their circle meeting, and what the expectation is for sharing at the circle meeting. Students write their responses in a reading journal (we use these all year). Students choose their job from the board pictured below.

I give students a calendar of the literature circle's reading assignments and circle meetings. This example calendar was created at calendarsthatwork.com.

 

Now I score students weekly with a simple rubric and viola…..literature circles don’t give me headaches anymore! I've also updated my job cards to better support Common Core. 

 

Interested? The job cards are available for purchase in my TPT store. A preview is available as well.

Happy reading!

Text-Dependent Questions Poster

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Like many of your schools, we have been going through training to prepare us for Common Core. One message we’ve heard time and time again is that reading comprehension questions need to be text-dependent. Our current reading basal was adopted several years ago, when a student’s ability to make connections with their own lives was more important than making connections within text. So our teachers are spending a lot of time trying to “bump up” the questions within our basal to make them more text-dependent. I’ve created this key words poster to help with the process! Grab your FREEBIE here.