Teaching Reading: Mini Lesson Format (Calkins, 2001)

Targeted Literacy Strategy or Skill: Synthesizing: How Reading Changes

Thinking
Grade level: 3rd
Objective: The student will be able to notice how thinking evolves and changes as
we read.
Common Core State Standard: Reading: Informational Text 3.2: Determine
the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the
main idea.
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.) The students are not noticing the change in their opinion or their
background knowledge when they read.
Mentor Text: Why reading fluency should be hot! Timothy Rasinski
Materials: Lesson from Strategies that work pg.183-184
Student Groups (whole/small group/partners):
Connect (AKA~ Anticipatory Set, Engagement/Pre-reading):
The main point of reading nonfiction is add to our knowledge base, and think about
new information, and what it takes to integrate it into our schema's. Often many
students dont truly know what reading means to them. Today we are going to
notice our thinking before and after we have read or heard something.
Teach:
On Tuesday,we read an article about reading fluency that we jigsawed in class. The
part that I read was about prosody. Before reading this article about fluency, I just
thought that fluency was only about reading fast and coherent. On my "Before
Reading" side of paper I will put that what I originally thought that fluency is. But,
upon reading the article I learned fluency is reading with expression, too. I had to
delete some things from my schema about fluency and add this new information
that I gathered from my reading. Reading the new information about fluency
changed how I understood fluent reading and how I will think about this new
information. So I will on the After Reading. I would have put that fluency is just
reading fast and coherent. After I read the article I would add that fluency is reading
with expression and emphasize. Giving the reading meaning.
Active Engagement :

Now we are going to read this article"College Kids Have Too Much Privacy" by
Michele Willins for the Los Angeles Times . Before we read this new article, get out
your notebooks, and open to the next clean blank page." Model the way I am going
to set the notebook up. Divide the page in half and label the two columns Before
Reading and After Reading. In your Before Reading side what you think about
colleges give students to much freedom. This is open for your interpretation on
what too much freedom is. Give them the article and let them read it in as a group.
Now that you have read this article, write what you think in the after side of the
page, and don't be afraid to express your opinion. Different opinions lead to the
class talking about what each other thought, and felt.
Link (AKA~ Closing the Lesson [with accountability for the skill/process]):
"So, as you continue reading your nonfiction books/ textbooks, think about what we
have learned. When learning something new about a subject or when you gain new
information, you must "delete" the old information that is incorrect, and replace it
with the new information that you have learned."