Middle School Language Arts, Middle School Reading

Surprisingly Easy Ways to Start Literature Circles in Middle School

Linda Asaro
April 20, 2022

Creating, teaching, and successfully implementing literature circles in middle school sounds like a pretty daunting and destined-to-fail task. But it really isn’t. With a little planning, book clubs run themselves, and you, as teacher, will be circulating and just listening in. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t. There are resources to purchase out there…I have plenty. But you can do it yourself. Here’s how.

blog post on starting literature circles in middle school — In this post, you will see how easy it is to get your middle school book clubs up and running!

Form Your Literature Circles in Middle School

First, you need to get kids in clubs. Here is a plan that I have found successful:

Give kids choice. To begin, I like to let kids choose not only their books, but their club members. The point is to get kids excited about this. If they are reading a book that they hate or working with kids who make them uncomfortable, then it’s not going to be a good experience. And we want to create life-long readers.

Organize it. Next, I usually post a Google form, asking for their top three group members and their top 3 books from the genre.

Tweak it. Lastly, you will most likely have to regroup a few kids, so that you have a nice mix. At the middle school level for book clubs, I am not as concerned about the reading level (unless there is a huge disparity of ability) as I am about interest and socialization.

Literature Circles in Middle School: It’s All in the Planning

In this step, you will definitely need to take some time to set up a slideshow or notebook pages for your students.

Items to include for literature circles in middle school:

A reading plan: Give kids a chart with specific due dates. As a club, students will select how much they read, balancing out by chapter or by pages. I always recommend going by chapters, but if there are no chapters, tell kids to look for a natural break at the end of a paragraph. Note: There is a free plan included in my free “Starting Book Clubs” mini-lesson, so you’ll want to grab that!

Mini-Lessons: You should plan what topics you will cover in your mini-lessons. Keep them brief…about 10-15 minutes maximum. The point of a reading workshop is to get kids reading, not just talking about reading. Some good ideas to include: plot line, character traits, theme, point of view, etc.

I have a series of reading mini-lessons on TPT; check them out if you need help.

I also have a free resource to get you started:

free mini lesson on starting literature circles in middle school — Grab your free mini lesson here!

Discussion Questions: Questions should match your mini-lessons. For example, if you did a mini-lesson about point of view, a good question could be, “How might the story change if the author wrote in third person instead of in first person?”

I have a free resource for this. Click here for your free book club discussion set.

Posting/Responding: Get kids used to jotting notes by giving a few simple strategies. For example, ask them to post when the see text evidence of a character trait. Then, they can record the character trait, the text evidence, and why they think it’s important to the plot.

Follow-Up Activity: This can be anything that fits what your students and curriculum dictate. Ideas: Character sketches with character traits, an essay on character traits, or informally sharing their books in a “speed dating” style.

Start Reading!

Finally, it’s time to read. I run my readers’ workshop like this:

Mini-lesson (10-15 minutes)- introduce skill and practice; this is the direct instruction. Check out the free mini-lesson below.

free literary terms and plot structure lesson for middle school — This is a paid product, but is free to my subscribers.

Time to Read – as I said before…that’s the whole point!

Discussion – Done on the due date from the reading plan.

So, I hope you and your class will benefit from the ideas. You can make your own plan, but if you are just getting started, I have complete reading units for middle school book clubs. They contain the reading plan, all the mini-lessons, discussion questions aligned to the mini-lessons, room for kids to post ideas and text evidence, and a culminating project. Best of all, it’s all linked in one slideshow…just attach to your Google Classroom™ or digital learning platform and you’re good to go!

Whatever you do, enjoy it! I have found literature circles in middle school to be a highlight of my year.