Jessica Fisher

09/16/15

Teaching Reading: Mini Lesson Format (Calkins, 2001)

Targeted Literacy Strategy or Skill: Merging prior experience and the text to create visual images.
Grade level: 4
Objective: The student will be able to understand the importance of using vivid word choice.
Common Core State Standard/ PASS Standard: RL.4.1 Refer to details and examples in a text when
explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
Prior knowledge: (What students already know)
Students know how to read fluently, as well as recognize and understand vocabulary.
Observations/Rationale: (Before Lesson) What did you notice in your students work that let you
know this lesson was necessary? (This will be an approximation this semester.)
I noticed that my students were skipping over details in their reading, and not referring to these details as
important in their writing. While they were retaining the ideas of the story, they were missing important
details that add depth to the story.
Materials Needed
Lesson from (Name your source including page number): Strategies That Work: Reading
Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement. Page 134.
Mentor Text: Visualizing from a vivid piece of text.
Materials: the lead to chapter 3 Escape, in Charlottes Web, by E.B. White.
Student Groups (whole/small group/partners): Students begin in a whole group to receive the lesson, and
then transition into individual deskwork to reinforce the lesson.
Mini Lesson Format:
Connect (AKA~ Anticipatory Set, Engagement/Pre-reading):
Readers I am very excited for the lesson that we have prepared for today! You are all doing a
wonderful job of reading fluently, but I have noticed that sometimes when we read long
descriptive passages we are tending to skip over or skim through them in order to reach what we
think are the more interesting parts of the story. When we do this, we miss out on important
details that set the tone and give us an image to create for the story! Lets look at some examples
weve read recently of vivid imagery. We will look at how we each interpret these words
individually, as well as how this interpretation affects the meaning that we reach from the story.

Teach (Model/Explain)
Class, please close your eyes as I read. Read passage Now, when I read this and close my eyes
I can see an old barn that I visited one time to take pictures. I can see the charming old doors, and
the bright red paint that gave that barn character. My personal experience affects how I view the
barn that E. B. White wants us to see! Tell me about your thoughts while I was reading this. What

pictures did your mind come up with?

Active Engagement (AKA~ Check for Understanding: students try it out, teacher observes):
Now I want you to go back to your desk and draw your barn. You may use colors, but make sure
that your barn resembles the barn you thought of when we were reading. Each barn will probably
be different from each others and that is perfectly fine! We each have our own thoughts and
experiences that shape who we are as readers. Students return to their desks and draw the
barn that they see in their head when they heard the beginning of the story.

Link (AKA~ Closing the Lesson [with accountability for the skill/process])
Even though we each heard the same words that described the same barn, we each imagined a
different barn from our classmates! Visualizing is an important concept that affects how we
understand the reading. If we skip over these long passages because they seem irrelevant, we miss
out on something important the author was trying to tell us! We will re-read the story tomorrow so
that we can fully understand just how important this barn was to the themes in the story! Lets
make sure that we pay attention to every word the author uses so we can better understand the
story in our future reading adventures.