The Romeo and Juliet centres while successful will need some editing and refining for next time. Interestingly enough some of these weaknesses were made even more obvious after reading Differentiated Literacy Centers by Margo Southall (ISBN 978-0-439-89909-3). Most importantly was the need for an "I'm done" zone and a "catch up" zone. I guess I just assumed that everyone would work at the same pace - clearly that was WRONG. The other suggestion Southall has is the possibility of self-rotation to allow students to move when ready. I fear that this option might not work for a locally developed class. However, if an EA or teacher was present at each centre they could help to re-focus the new joiners.
I also would like to add a writing component to each centre - especially the Podcast centre. Liana's group would have like to also film this one rather than just record voices. Either way I think this centre is the one in need of some tweaking.
Lastly, two good activities from Southall's book that I would like to try next time are the Read, Relate, Respond form (there is a good starting point on page 84). This might be a good activity for the "I'm done" zone. A place where the students can think about the text with respect to themselves, the actual text, and finally the world. She also has an excellent Critics' Cube - page 131 - that we could complete as a whole class at the end of the unit. Since we started with a survey and KWL chart we can end with the follow up survey, the L part of the KWL chart and a Critics' Cube.
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