21st
Century Skills.
Many
are the skills dealt with in Literature Circles, Book Clubs, Workshops and the
follow up activities done after story telling.
Summarizing Skills
This is an ability
that I consider to be one of the most important aspects of reading since it
shows that a reader has truly understood the materials read and allows him to
activate lots of thinking in order to use their ideas and findings in his own
way. Every time a story or a factual text is read and shared, there’s the
natural need to summarize it. It’s been done by the ¨summarizer¨ in Literature
Circles, mainly, but the truth is that the rest of the roles in the discussion
group do end up summarizing the text read but from different points of view
when they are to fulfill their roles.
One of the tasks
assigned for the Macbeth readers was to summarize some scenes, and every time
there was a tweet done or piece of news shared by means of hash tags (not done
by me), I believe that the summarizing skills were fully put into practice.
Logical
and Creative Thinking
When assigned specific tasks, readers were engaged into looking for many possible
answers rather than one, and in this way they were allowed to make wild and
crazy suggestions as well as those that seem sensible, but probably different
from others´.
Communicative skills
In accordance with the
tasks assigned, students were in need to put into practice their presentation
skills mainly, if I had to mention one of the great range of communicative
skills. As opposed to what happens in the classrooms (this is used infrequently),
the Literature library activities are greatly oriented to giving a brief
presentation or talk to other members of a small group who are sharing the analysis
of a piece of text. For this aim, clear and effective transmission of the target
message is implied.
Bringing the World Into The Classroom
I believe that bringing
a story into the library is a way to bring a little piece of the world into it;
a piece of a foreign author’s world, and the world itself because of the
differences in culture implied in a text. Storytellers bring their world too.
Annabelle Howard did bring her own world, the foreign school participants brought
their world into our classrooms.
Collaborating with other teachers
I managed to accompany
all forms by selecting different genres that suit the main theme of their projects;
either by offering online texts or activity suggestions or paper material. Also
by storytelling/reading stuff which was also thematically linked to their
projects.
There was a number of library
projects also shared with the Spanish Library –though activities carried out
were obviously different- such as the Celebration of the Library Anniversary, the
Reading Marathon, the International Literacy Day.
