Your Purpose Might Just Be Hiding!
Before we dive into jobs, let's talk a minute about purpose! Everything we do as teachers should have a purpose. I have honestly read other teachers share that their Book Clubs for kids have no purpose besides being a Book Club. This, my friends, has a deeper purpose! You are using the skill of talking about REAL LITERATURE in a real world setting! That means you should be diving into researching this topic to build a structure for this talk, a structure to teach real literature without the kids knowing it! Higher order thinking is your real goal-learn how to utilize it in this setting! Because everything we do HAS A PURPOSE! Look for it, it is there!
The Best Book Club for Kids Jobs!
There are so many ways you can utilize Literature Circle Roles. These roles were shared by Harvey Daniels in Voice and Choice in Literature Circles. It was simple then to utilize these roles to teach within Book Clubs for kids. I used these roles, or jobs as we now call them, with my first real experiences back when I first learned about Literature Circles. However, times have changed. The demand of testing and the new Standards that most of us teach under, has really called to us about how to build skills and understanding within the texts students read. That means we need to have jobs that have the most bang for our buck! Above all, students need to be practicing skills that can be bridged back to the Standards and meet the demand of testing. These five jobs do just that!
Job #1: Summarizer
This job is just what it is named. Students write a summary of their reading. This could be a chapter or even multiple chapters. This process is key to many smaller parts of a variety of standards. Determining key details, sequencing, and critically examining the text are ways that students use reading to build a summary! Plus, students strengthen their vocabulary and writing skills, as they cannot just copy sentences from the text. This is not a skill to take lightly. Writing summaries together, giving feedback on summaries written, and reteaching to your class will all be part of this job. In the end, it is worth the time to do this. Your students will boost so many reading skills just through learning how to properly write a summary! Take the time to use this valuable job in Books Clubs for kids!
Job #2 Questioner
This job is so much more than asking questions. But, let's start with the obvious! When you are looking at the basics of the new standards, you will find that many of the foundations start in asking questions about a text. And, yet, kids struggle with doing this! They struggle with finding questions with real meat to them. This can be developed through Book Clubs for kids. The job of Questioner is about asking quality questions and, also, providing an answer. As a teacher, this gives me insight into what students are questioning as they read. When you look at this deeper, you an clearly develop an understanding of their higher-order thinking. If students are stuck on obvious questions, they are lacking higher-order thinking. It is my job to begin to cultivate this through lessons. If students still struggle, it is time for some one-on-one help to build this area up. Their answer are just as insightful. A student can ask a great question, but totally miss the mark that their answer can have multiple answers. It is when students open up to the idea that a question can have many answers that debate occurs-and it does, naturally, in Book Clubs for kids.
In addition to developing question to ask the group, the Questioner is responsible for running the group. This starts very early on when I still sit with the groups, especially in the younger grades. I try to act as a silent witness, offering as little guidance as possible. This helps in the gradual release to student-led Book Clubs. I have my students use the Questioner form to work through their Book Club leading. Soon, students are leading, no matter what their ability is!
Job #3: Plot Picker
This job in Book Clubs for kids is another way for students to meet specific Standards that you need to assess. They need to critically analyze the text to determine the climax of the chapter or section they are reading. Students must wade through key details to pick the moment that impacts the story the most. This can be difficult for students since there may be a variety of opinions based on what they are reading. This job, more than any of the others, can lead to a real debate among students-and that is what you are looking for. Students can strengthen their skills of talking correctly and building debate naturally within the Book Club structure. Be sure to be watching for it and guiding it along. I have used good group debates as "fishbowl" moments. I have the students recreate their debate and have others watch. This way, we can talk about successful debates and how you correctly talk and react within them. This words for any grade (I have even done this with First Graders!)
Job #4: Character Sketcher
Character Sketcher is 100% looking at Character Traits. Students must choose a moment from their reading and explain this character through traits that they see in their reading. This is a key moment to assess the difference between actions and reactions. This one is difficult for students when it really comes down to it. They think the characters actions cause the trait, when in reality it is their reactions that are the trait. Continued practice in Book Clubs for kids is a simple way to build and grow this skill to mastery. Kids are looking at their character across a WHOLE story, across many events and many interactions with others. This is what is missing in those guided reading books. (Read more here!) There is not enough depth to characters in these texts to get what students need! That is why real literature in Book Clubs just does amazing things with students. And this is a job that proves that fact!
Job #5: Connector
Emotions play a huge role in who we are as readers. This is why this job is important. It takes the time to dive into the feelings of the reader and to dig into their schema. I will never forget when one of my toughest fifth graders ever was reading Old Yeller'. We were in the middle of Book Club and I was monitoring their group. I was standing behind him when he started. All of a sudden he broke down in tears. He explained that when he was younger one of his dogs died and how this story brought him right to that moment and how he just knew how Travis had to have felt. He just knew it because it was exactly how he felt. It was powerful and moving. We were a tight knit group, so it didn't go anywhere past our classroom-and all the kids hugged hime sometime in the day. It was real, it was powerful, it was real literature in action! It was also 15 years ago for me-and it has stayed with me all that time. That is the power of connecting in Book Clubs for kids!
Other Jobs
Yes, there are other jobs. Here is what I have to say about that! I have tried all of the other jobs and have personally found that they lack the depth of the jobs I have shared here. These can (and are included in my Book Club products) Word Nerd, Visualizer, Passage Picker, and Travel Tracer. The problem with these is not found in the job itself. All have their value. The problem lies in the sharing of the job. With Word Nerd, students loose interest hearing words and their definitions. This can cause off-task behaviors to jump up and disrupt your groups. I find that if I let kids pick words across the text and do this job as an individual product, I get better results. Visualizer is a weak job in general. Students must show a picture and discuss their picture. I find this amount of drawing, especially with older kids, is not a good use of classroom time. Again, this one can be used at the end to share "the moment" that stuck with them! The two that have some traction are Passage Picker and Travel Tracer. Both look more closely at the reading, but both can be somewhat boring to listeners and frustrating to the student completing the task. What if they reading only has one setting (Travel Tracer) or too many settings?! What if the student doesn't like this part of the reading and finds no value in the passages they have read? All of these are areas I've had students struggle with. These struggles are an important part of understanding the Book Club jobs presented here!
Differentiation!
The good news is that ALL of these Book Club roles can be differentiated to meet the needs of your students. You will find value in all the jobs presented when you are differentiating. Each and every one of these jobs becomes important to students if you look at what they need in that moment. A struggling reader just may need that Visualizing job when they are completing a Book Club. It's easy to differentiate by having leveled pages representing each job.
The Advanced Set includes the first page offered as the limited drawing. Some students in grades 3-5 will benefit from drawing, but I find it is key to keep the written work as the most important element on the pages. The goal with Book Clubs for Kids in the intermediate grades should always be about what they are presenting to the group in written form, not the drawings that accompany the work. I think this can get lost sometimes in Book Clubs! But, just like with the Basic Level of Book Clubs, this set can easily be differentiated to meet the needs of each of the students in your classroom!
What do you think about these jobs, or roles for Book Clubs for kids? I'd love to know what works for you, what doesn't work for you, or what you are interested in hearing more of?! Leave me a comment or hit me up on Facebook or Instagram! (Be sure to follow to get all the most recent information about my classroom!)
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