Movie Lit Circle: The City of Ember

For the literature circles my group read The City of Ember, an amazing book that I think any middle school or upper elementary students would immediately become interested in. The story follows two strong characters, a boy and a girl, so I think that makes it really appealing to both genders because they have a protagonist that they can relate to. I think this book was sort of a cliff hanger, in that each chapter ended in a way that made me want to continue on and find out more. Even at the end of this book I am still left with questions about Lina and Doon and their escape from the city, so many questions that I actually just took the second book in the series out from the library today.

Our group decided to do a movie production literature circle, which I think worked really well with this text and with such a large group. I think it would be difficult to do a movie production lit circle with a smaller group, because there were so many important and interesting roles that it would be hard to eliminate any roles, although when we were talking as a group we thought it might be possible to combine some of the roles such as set designer and soundtrack producer. I really loved the enthusiasm that the members of this group brought to both of our literature circle meetings, every group member came prepared with some type of prop or insight to share with the group, which made the discussions go very smoothly and easily. I think with younger students you would have to provide a lot of modeling, teacher guidance, and examples before they could run a lit circle of this type on their own, and I think that the worksheets available online for each different role could be very helpful in that situation. I also think that once students see how their peers are handling different roles, they will be inspired to put their own spin on it. I really liked that we changed roles during this lit circle, because during the first meeting a group member would interpret their role one way, and during the next meeting someone else would interpret it completely differently.

Our discussions started with the director reading aloud their section summary, and then each group member worked their information smoothly into the discussion. The manager probed a deeper level of understanding of the text by asking important question as we discussed. I think the role of manager could be difficult for some children, so for the first few attempts at this type of lit circle the teacher might want to act as the manager, or specifically pick a student that might excel in that area. What I really love about this type of lit circle is the flexibility it provides for including multiple intelligences in the classroom. With this lit circle students can excel using linguistic, visual spatial and musical intelligences, all in one class activity.

As adults using this type of lit circle, all of the group members seemed to be excited and engaged about their observations and the products they created, and I can only imagine children having a similar if not more intense reaction. I also noticed that doing this type of lit circle really allowed me and some other group members to visualize the story and the setting a lot better. I think it was Elisabeth that pointed out that the book doesn’t mention very many colors, because the setting is really dark and dreary. This is an observation she probably would not have noticed, if she had not been imaging the text as a movie as she read.

Overall I would say that I thoroughly enjoyed both this lit circle experience and the book The City of Ember. I hope that this type of lit circle is something that I can try in my internship next year (with third graders) and if I do use this technique I think it will be very important to pick a book that can work well in this format. I would also really like to try creating a movie trailer, because I think it would just be awesome for the kids to see their movie ideas put into action.