Book Club Plus Ch. 6-8

My CT’s literacy program usually has three main parts – guided reading, centers, and writing. The class is divided into four reading groups and each day the four groups spend 20-30 minutes in each part of the literacy program. For guided reading, each group spends the time reading with the teacher, discussing the text, making connections, and working on comprehension strategies. For centers, my CT will assign individual students to work on different activities each day based on the skills they need to practice (forming sentences, word meanings, phonics, comprehension, etc.) Students are grouped at their instructional level for these reading groups (reading below grade level, mostly at grade level, above grade level, etc.), similar to the descriptions of “Literacy Block” in Book Club Plus. She is trying to encourage students in these reading groups, especially in the higher level groups, to move from having purely teacher-led discussions to discussions where students talk to each other and the teacher about the text. At this point, these discussions are still very much teacher-led because the students are still learning not to talk over and argue with one another during reading time. However, I believe that with continued practice and frequent modeling from the teacher the students’ discussion skills will improve. Due to the fact that we have been preparing for the MEAP and also working on a couple large writing activities I have not seen many of the Book Club Plus ideas used in my CT’s classroom. Based on conversations I’ve had with her, I do know that she will be implementing more of these ideas later. For example, I know that later on the different reading groups will each be reading a different novel centered around a theme. I am excited to see the conversations that students will have as their build meaning around these more complex texts.

Recently my class has all been reading the same texts from their basal reader, but they have done so in leveled groups. If I were to try grouping the students into more heterogeneous book club groups for discussions the students would need considerable preparation and modeling first in order to have productive conversations in their new groups. It might be helpful to begin by introducing the discussion format in students’ leveled groups and guiding them through sharing ideas with one another and recording those ideas in a reading log. A fishbowl discussion could then be used a few times to model the kinds of discussions they should have in their mixed groups, based on the ideas they previously generated. Some individual students would also need more specific modeling for discussion skills such as taking turns, staying focused on the discussion, and making their ideas clear.