Hi Jan, How do you hold your students accountable to your lesson during their independent reading? Do you have a variety of tasks or one overriding assignment that the children have to complete? The management and accountability piece interests me. Thanks. Leslie
Hi Meghan- I am confused with the comment "it should take several days to get through a mini-lesson doing think aloud for the students with one picture". To me a mini-lesson is just that -mini. It has one teaching point and should take about 10 minutes. I use a read aloud to model my thinking as a reader. You do not have to read the whole book in one sitting. I model the strategy I want my students to try, have them try it in a turn and talk with a partner, and then restate what I want them to try during independent reading and send them off to practice it. I do believe it will take several days for the students to be able to fully take on the strategy. When teaching schema, I would often get frustrated with the surface, go no where connections. The character has a dog, so a child says I have a dog -however, the dog is not meaningful to the story... So now I ask my students to figure out why the author wrote the story -what is the message. Then they work on making a connection to the message of the story. Example: The message is you should try an be friends with people who are different than you. I have a connection with this because when school started there was a new kid here from Georgia and he had no friends. People thought he was weird because he talked "funny". I made friends with him and you know what -he doesn't talk funny -he just sounds different than me. I also learned over time, that if you want students to get better at something they need LOTS of practice time. My independent reading time is 45 minutes. By the way, I teach 3rd grade this year. I was a literacy/math coach for the past 7 years. Jan We must view young people not as empty bottles to be filled, but as candles to be lit. -Robert Shaffer ----- Original Message ----- _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
