Mixing It Up: Literature Circles and Informative Writing

In the past few years, our Language Arts department has been undergoing some changes.  Two years ago, I was asked to pilot a set of literature circle books (that I got to help choose!), which I was happy to do since I felt the books we currently had in our curriculum could use some updating.  Then, last year, we were given a set of Lucy Calkins’ Units of Writing books and asked to implement them as well.  It was great having all of these new resources, but the problem was nothing else was taken in exchange for the new material.  It all was a bit overwhelming to try to fit all of it in.

 

This year, when planning the literature circle unit, I decided to mix things up a bit and incorporate the informative writing unit of Lucy Calkins into my literature circles.  We started around Valentine’s Day, so I had the kids do a “Speed Dating” activity to get to know the books and make their choices.  We have a wide variety of titles and genres, and so the kids usually have no problem finding a book that they feel they would enjoy (and they usually do). I have the students choose their top 3 choices for books, and I try to give them their first or second choice, depending on the make-up of the groups, difficulty level of the texts, and the number of books I have.

Once groups are created and books are distributed, I leave the rest up to the students. Each group decides the assignments for reading and who will complete which role for each meeting date.  Meeting dates are also set by the students.  I find that this really helps students to have ownership over the discussions, and they tend to do the work if their group assigns it more so than if I assign it. Go figure. Students are required to do each role once:  discussion leader, reporter, diction detective, and bridge builder.  The role sheets help to guide the discussions and are collected at the end of the unit to assess various objectives.

The first year I did this, the students kept journals and responded to Q-focus questions that they created in their groups.  This time, however, I wanted to incorporate the informative unit from the Lucy Calkins set because it was all about analyzing reading, so it seemed to go perfectly! Instead of journaling throughout the literature circle unit, I set aside days when we would meet for writing instruction. These days were off limits for literature circle groups to meet.  I would instruct them on a new skill from the writing unit to focus on in their writing until our next writing lesson.  This was helpful for a few reasons.  It helped to break up the monotony of the writing unit (Sorry, Lucy!).  I love the Writing Units, but sometimes, I feel like it’s super intense, and the kids get bored and overwhelmed.  It also allows me more time to read each students’ writing at various points in the unit and provide them feedback that I just didn’t seem to have time for before.  By breaking it up with the literature circles, the days when groups weren’t meeting, I was able to go around and read their journals while they read or worked on role sheets.

I feel like this was a successful blend of two very time intensive units.  The kids really seemed to get more out of their books by spending so much time writing about them and analyzing them in a way that they wouldn’t have done if just doing the literature circles alone.  In addition, by writing throughout the literature circle unit and focusing on specific writing skills, they were cultivating thoughtful responses that were long and linked to the text in ways that they never would have thought of on their own, without the writing instruction sessions.

I will continue to do this “mixed up” unit and am going to see if there are other ways that I can intermingle various pieces of the curriculum.  Not only does it make managing time and planning better, I really feel that it made both units that much more meaningful for the students.