Book Clubs
Third grade is a big year during reading workshop. Starting all the way in September, kiddos not only start learning about character motivation, whole book themes, cross-text themes, and many other heady work (even for us grown-ups), but they also start to learn what it means to be a reader. They begin to learn what a "readerly life" truly means.
In real life, readers often share their reading with others, and reader challenge the thinking of others. Book clubs is a great place to promote this type of work. But as any elementary teacher will tell you, asking a group of third graders to sit and talk, in depth, about a book, and to come to some larger understanding through that conversation can lead to disaster. If there isn't a substantial amount of work done before the first book club meeting, it will turn into a classroom management disaster.
To prepare kids for book clubs, we start early in the year learning about how people have conversations. We learn what people do with their body language and how people ask follow-up questions. We learn how to talk long about one idea, and how to cite evidence from the book. We even learn how disagreement can be good, if done politely and strategically.
In February groups of four are handed the keys to their brand new, shiny book club. And like a parent, it's hard being the teacher, standing off to the side, hoping they done drive it into a tree before even making it around the block once.
The first few book clubs are awkward. There's a lot of nervous laughter. (From the kids too.) Half of what they say is, "Um." Kids rely heavily on the conversational prompts chart in the front of the room. But it's okay. Everybody has to start somewhere.
As clubs meet, the awkwardness starts to wear off. Kids start to rely on the charts around the room. In fact, if you couldn't hear what they were saying, it probably would look pretty good. Pretty good isn't really what we are going for.
AppleTV Saves the Day
To help lift the level of conversation, I "coach-in" to book clubs. It's a great way to compliment kiddos on the great things that they might not even know they are doing, and a quick way to offer a tip to deepen the level of conversation. (And sometimes it's just fun to play the role of a 3-year-old and keep asking "Why?" over and over until the group magically comes to some big idea. I'm still not sure how that happens.)
There often are many great things happening. However, I usually have 7 book clubs, and they all meet at the same time. It's fine because I can zip around the room, but they don't ever get to see what any of the other groups are doing. When I select a group to recreate something in front of the class, they suddenly forget absolutely everything they talked about. It's weird.
Often, as I'm totally eavesdropping, I have my iPhone out, loaded up to the video camera. Now, you need to understand something about me: I'm always taking pictures or video or something. By February, kids are used to having a camera stuck in their face. It doesn't even phase them anymore. So when I hear see something I think might be useful for the rest of the class to see, you bet'cha: I stick my camera right into the center of the group and record it.
Sometimes I might record the entire club conversation of one group. Sometimes I capture 30 seconds from one group, 30 seconds from another. But strangely enough, kids LOVE to be recorded. In fact, if one group has more "air time" than any other group, I will surely hear about it. They can't remember where their other gym shoe is, but they KNOW that group 3 went twice last week.
My Favorite Part
After book clubs meet, everybody comes back up to the meeting space. As kids are transitioning, I'm quickly decided what I just captured that might be a great learning opportunity, either for the group recorded, or for the rest of the class. Sometimes I choose a recording because a certain kiddo was really shining brightly and showing it to the class my help build his self esteem.
The protocol always works like this:
1. Compliment all the amazing things I saw, giving specific examples from groups.
2. The drawn-out reveal of which group we are going to watch.
3. Remind kids to watch for two things:
What is something this group did well that you'd like to try with your book club?
If you could offer one tip to help this group, what would you suggest?
(Sometimes I have kids take notes, sometimes I ask them to just think about it.)
4. Connect my iPhone to my AppleTV through AirPlay, then play the video on the classroom projector.
5. (If time) Have partners or book clubs debrief and combine their notes/ideas
6. Share out
7. Ask kids to reflect upon this video. What is one thing they learned that they think their group can try tomorrow?
I tell you what, when one group starts citing pages numbers in the video, suddenly the next day EVERY group is citing page numbers. I could have told them 1,000 times to do it and they would forget. They see another group do it one time, and suddenly they're experts. And they want me to record them doing it too!
The Nuts and Bolts
Before I had an AppleTV I did this two different low-tech ways:
1. I stuck my phone under the document camera. Aside from the sound, it actually works pretty well!
2. I got the iPhone to VGA cord and plugged my phone into the projector. Again, it looked beautiful, but the sound wasn't great.
Here's what you need to make this work with an AppleTV (which makes life SO much easier)
1. You need an AppleTV ($99 on the Apple Store. I picked mine up at Best Buy)2. A projector (My classroom already had one)
3. Speakers (Most projectors have speakers built in. My classroom has the ceiling mounted "Audio Enhancement" sound system, so I plugged the sound from the AppleTV into that.)
4. Wifi
5. An iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or a Mac with OSX Mountain Lion
IMPORTANT: AppleTV only outputs to HDMI. Many newer projectors have HDMI, so if your projector does, great! My projector did NOT have HDMI, so I needed an HDMI to VGA converter. This is the one that I have, but if you do a search on Amazon for "HDMI to VGA Audio Video Converter", there are a billion choices.
Connecting to the AppleTV
So I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE AirPlay. I love being able to play music during writing workshop, and being able to have the volume controls right on my phone in my pocket. I love being able to turn on the camera and use it like a wireless mobile document camera. (That comes in handy during science!)To play the video:
1. In the camera roll, pull up the video you want to show.
2. Click the Airplay symbol.
3. Select your Apple TV
4. Press play, and voila!
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