In humanities, we are currently reading books for Literature Circles, and the one I am reading is "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle", by Avi. Our assignment for this blogpost is to do three paragraphs on these questions: "1.The benefits of working with a classmate. 2. Challenges / obstacles which you overcame (tried to overcome). 3. New understandings that you gained about the novel." for how we Collaborated Constructively for our "Lit. Circle with a twist", which is a collaborative Literature Circle. So, enough of the introduction, lets go onto what the benefits of having a partner, challenges that faced my group and I, and how we collaborated.
There are pros and cons to having a partner, but I'll just talk about the pros. Having a partner, there are many benefits toward it. One example is that the work, will be split, so you wont have to do the WHOLE thing. Another reason is that it's just fun to work with them, unless they aren't your friend, which will end up with you and your partner disagreeing a lot. Mainly, the benefit for Collaborative Lit. Circles is splitting up the work. You don't have to spend hours looking for 2 questions, or searching through your brain for 2 connections. For this, you just have to do 1 passage, 1 question and response, 1 connection and 1 vocabulary word. Normally, we have to do double that amount. But, for this Lit. Circle, the worst thing you could have is a bad partner. A bad--- no, horrible partner makes you do all the work, and in my teacher's words, "sits there like a dying duck in a thunderstorm" which basically means fool around and make you do the work. From having a bad partner, you WILL , no doubt about it, get a bad grade. Thankfully, I didn't have any bad partners.
For my group and I, there were some challenges. One of them were that one of my partners, got disabled from his account. That meant he couldn't access the document we had to work on. We (my other group member and I) couldn't check what he was doing and help him improve his work. For me as an individual, a challenge was actually getting myself to start my lit. circle. It took me a lot to get myself to start the work, because I was distracted with chatting and other things I'd rather not mention. I finally got working, when my friend helped me with ways to keep out the annoying things that usually makes me off-task. When I actually started, it was pretty smooth and we didn't have any problems from there.
There were somethings I had learned during that Lit. Circle. One, is that the main character, Charlotte had enough courage to stand up to Captain Jaggery, which I thought was amazing for Charlotte, because no one would ever thought she would be brave enough to whip him across the face, just for Zachariah. I was also amazed that she actually agreed to climb up the mast, to join the crew to avenge the death of Zachariah. I understood that Charlotte, changed from a girl whose father chose the path of her life, to a woman who can make her own decisions. I learned that, Charlotte is a more confident woman, and the boat had changed her life completely.
Sources:
On November 2nd, 2010, we shared our first Lit. Circles with different books. The book I chose was "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle", by the legendary Avi. Since we have finished sharing the first few chapters, we were assigned a blogpost to do on what we understood about the book, connections we had with our group members and the book characters, and predictions we have. So now, hopefully you won't get bored, you will read my blogpost on the progress of our first Lit. Circle.
To start off, I want to talk about what my group members and I further understood about the book. One of my group members and I thought that a character in the book, Zachariah, talked in third person. Talking in third person means to talk to a person, but saying their name instead of you. An example is from the book, "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle". " 'Miss. Doyle doesn't know what will happen,' " That was the part where Zachariah gave the main character, Charlotte, a knife to protect herself for reasons, which I will soon find out.
Sometimes in my group, we have connections. Usually when someone makes a comment other people agree to it, and if they don't, they might get agreed with in their opinion. Since there is a lot of vocabulary in our book, there may not be any connections towards it, as there was in "Call it Courage". In the first Lit. Circle, we only had to read chapter 1 and 2, so mainly we had the same ideas for the passages, like when Zachariah gave Charlotte the knife. When we had our first Lit. Circle, we had questions, some same, some different, but mostly the same.
For this book, "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle", there are alot of predictions I have, compared to "Call it Courage". One of my predictions I have is that Mr. Grummage and Captain Jaggery are bad (or evil) people. Another one is that some of the men on The Seahawk are not very, how do you put it? Nice, let's go with that. They may seem to be nice, but I have a feeling they aren't pleasant to be around.
Sources:
http://www.sunprairiepubliclibrary.org/SunPrairiePublicLibrary-HistoricalSurvivalStories.html
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle- By Avi
