Literature Circle Reflection- The City of Ember

For our literature circles I was in The City of Ember group. I fell in love with the book right from the beginning and started it and finished it over the Fourth of July weekend. I found the plot to be very intriguing and once I reached the end of the book, I knew I was going to have to read the next three books in the series, because I became so invested in Lina and Doon and I still have so many unanswered questions. I feel because since the story is so thought provoking, The City of Ember would be a great book to do with children for a literature circle in an upper elementary classroom.


Our group decided to try the movie production literature circle, and it turned out great! There were eight members in our group, so we each had one job to complete before we met each time. I think by only being responsible for one job, we each put so much more effort into our work, because we only had to concentrate on that one responsibility. My job for the first ten chapters was the production designer and I made a collage of costume ideas, props, and set designs for “our” movie, and for the last ten chapters I was the soundtrack producer and I made a CD for sounds for specific scenes in the second half of “our” movie. I felt by having the jobs laid out in this way, I got more excited because I was looking forward to see what other people thought of for the creation of “our” movie, and discussing this in the group we all felt laying out a literature circle with this twist would help hook kids to the idea. We all thought that the jobs we were assigned helped us visualize the story more and hopefully this would happen to our students in the same way, and get the most responses out of them from analytical to performative. The City of Ember translated well into a movie, but all books do not and this is something that we as teachers need to think about before assigning the movie production literature circles.


During the actual literature circles the director would run the show and we would all share our jobs one by one and eventually we would end up having a great discussion about the book, which in the end is what literature circles are all about. When talking about how this type of literature circle would play out in the classroom, as a group we decided smaller sections of the books would have to be assigned and the groups would have to meet more often, so the students would not be so overwhelmed. We also discussed rotating the jobs and also assigning jobs to people’s strengths to hit on Multiple Intelligences. I also feel it would be helpful for the teacher to sit in on the first couple of discussions to help the students understand how to run their literature circles. Lastly, but probably the most important, teachers need to know their students and make sure they assign novels that will be interesting and engaging for their students, so they can get the positive results of rich discussions during their literature circles.


I know in my group and when we had the whole class share about their groups, it sounded like everyone had a positive experience with their books and their literature circles. I thought the experience was great and I think it is definitely something I would love to try in the classroom someday if I end up teaching in the higher grades (I don’t think it will work out so well next year when I am interning in first grade). All in all a great experience!