21^st 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.