Podcasts using Reading Circles

We recently read all eight books in the series, Charlie's Great Adventure, by C.A. Goody as our daily read aloud.  For more information on the series, visit the author's website..  It is a super cute series that my students always seem to enjoy because Charlie, the cat, always manages to get himself into the craziest adventures!  During our read alouds, my class is always expected to practice any given strategy, such as predicting, visualizing, making connections, questioning, evaluating, summarizing etc. and then share their written responses with a classmate for feedback.

Now that we've finished the series, I decided to teach my class what a Reading Circle is and what the expectations are when participating in one.  First, the purpose of Reading Circle's is to discuss what has been read in a less structured setting than you would see when doing traditional literature circles.  There are no jobs/roles that need to be completed.  It's more of an opportunity to use sticky notes to mark favorites parts, questions, confusing sections, powerful words, etc. while a student reads.  When their Reading Circle meets, they bring their sticky notes to the group to discuss them together.  What I really like about this strategy is that it's something we (adults) do naturally as readers.  We have favorite parts of the story.  We have sections where really interesting words appear.  We have questions and wonder about certain things.  So, in this type of setting, it allows the group to freely discuss, but also have certain expectations put in place.  Since it was the first time we tried Reading Circles, I had each student develop 3 questions and 1 reaction statement.  These were then shared during the discussion and each question had to have two responses to them.

Here are the discussions that were held today:

Here are the reaction statement stems that I gave:

• I wonder ...
• I predict ...
• This part reminds me of ...
• If I were in this situation, I would ...
• I can't believe ...
• I find it interesting that ...
• I liked it when ...
• I hope that ...
• In the next chapter ...
• My favorite part was ...
• I don't like ...

I will be incorporating Reading Circles into our weekly Houghton MIfflin stories and will move towards identifying various moments throughout the story to discuss with their group rather than just writing 3 questions and 1 reaction statement.  I'll be trying this tomorrow so we'll see how it goes!

For those of you interested, to record the discussions I used the iPad app, Show Me.  It's a super easy app to use and highly recommended.  I've used the app to create math tutorials to post in Edmodo for my class to watch when they get stuck on a certain type of problem.