1. Planning Minilessons

3. A Lifelong Conversation
Around Books and Reading

4. What aremy
beliefs about Minilessons?

5. #1 Designed with a vision of helping students gain the necessary
skills, strategies, and behaviors to become independent readers.
#2 Scaffolded across time to deepen and enrich understanding of concepts.
They are not activities delivered in isolation.
#3 Part of larger conversations that we as a community have about our reading
lives and that these conversations build over time.
#4 Interactive. Students should be the ones doing the thinking, not the teacher.
#5 Planned with the needs of current students in mind. They can't be
canned, scripted or duplicated year after year.

6. #6 The right length to match your teaching point. There is no magic number of
minutes for an effective minilesson.
#7 Organized in a way that makes the most sense to the teacher, school, or
district. There is no one right way to organize lessons.
#8 Based on what we know about teaching and learning. No matter the
mandates and pressures of state testing, there is no reason to compromise best
teaching practice.
#9 Designed to teach the reader not the book.
#10 Designed by the teachers who is doing the teaching, not corporations.

7. Big Questions for Minilesson
Planning
 Why do we teach this? How does it fit into the bigger
picture?
 What are the big goals I have?
 Which books might I use?
 How will I provide for students to enter at own level?
 What will I be assessing? Does assessment match the
big picture goals?

9. Minilesson Cycles Can Be
Lots of Ways to Plan
 Strategies—comprehension, word work
 Behaviors and Habits—book choice, stamina
 Literary Elements—character, theme
 Genre—nonfiction, mystery, historical fiction

10. What Are We Assessing?
What we don’t do, however, is
use our experience to direct
or guide towards our own
understanding of any given
text…..we need to teach each
student the way readers think
as they read, not what to
think, helping them to
experience texts as
readers, rather that putting
specific thoughts about texts
into their heads.

11. The Stranger

12. Unpacking Standards: Plot
 K-Retell or re-enact a story that has been heard.
 1-Retell the beginning, middle and ending of a story
including its important events.
 2-Retell the plot of a story.
 3-Retell the plot sequence.
 4-Identify the main incidents of a plot
sequence, identifying the major conflict and its
resolution.
 5-Identify the main incidents of a plot sequence and
how they influence future action.

13. 6th+
 Distinguish between main and minor plot incidents.
 Pace, subplots, parallel episodes, and climax
 Compare and contrast stories/characters with similar
conflicts
 How do voice and narrator affect plot

14. Plot
A story with very
obvious problem
and solution

15. Plot
Two stories with
similar plots to
discuss parts of a
story.

16. Plot
Same Problem
Different Solution

17. Unpacking the
Common Core

18. Character Cycle
Big Goals/Learning
 -Authors let us get to know characters in a variety of ways.
 -The more we know about a character, the better we can
predict and understand his/her actions.
 -Important characters often change over time.
 -Understanding how a character sees the world is critical to
understanding their thoughts, relationships, and actions.
 -There are words that readers use when they think and talk
about characters in fiction. These words give us ways to
think and talk at a deeper level.

19. Scaffolding with a
Menu of Books
A book that is more character-based than plot based and
might be a good one for this cycle.
 Several books that focus on the same character/characters
 Books with 2 characters who are great friends or who are
siblings. These often make for the best conversations about
relationships.
 Books that include several short stories about the same
character(s)
 Characters that the students love and talk about on their
own.

20. Characters
We learn about
characters through
their relationships
with others.

21. Character
We learn about a
character from the
way he/she
behaves and
reacts in a story.

23. Character
Readers learn
about characters
by the things they
say. (voice)

24. Character
The more we know
about a
character, the better
we can predict and
understand his/her
actions and
behaviors.

25. Character
Important
characters in a
book often change
over the course of
the story.

26. Big Picture of Theme Cycle: What
Am I Setting Up?
Understandings I Want My Students to Come Away With
in this Cycle
 *Readers have the power to determine the theme in a text.
 Authors often write a story with a bigger message about life
to the reader.
 There is often more than one theme in a book.
 There are universal themes that appear often in books.
 A theme works across an entire piece.


27. How do they get there from
where they are now?
Plot vs. Theme
Stated vs. Implied Theme
When Two Storylines Come Together
Repeated Language
Symbolism/Metaphors
General vs. Specific Theme
Universal Themes

28. YouTube Video Clips
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv015LtqA0A

29. Stated Vs.
Implied Theme
29

30. A Circle of Friends
Wordless Book
A Good First Look at Title
Significance of word “circle”

31. The Enormous Turnip
 Traditional Tales with
obvious and
accessible themes
are a great way to
introduce the
concept of theme as
well as universal
themes to students.

32. Artie and Julie
How do Storylines come
together?

33. Many Stories of Friendship

34. Wanda’s Roses/The Curious
Garden

35. A Menu of Options
Titles are often a
metaphor and a
clue into the theme
of the story.

36. Walk On!
A Guide for Babies of All
Ages
By Marla Frazee
Dedication
“to my son, Graham, off to
college”

39. “Any of these details….are, in
effect, entryways into deeper meanings
of the text. None is inherently more
important than the other and no one
inference about them is necessarily
“right”…What’s important is not which
detail readers notice but what they do
with them…..what they can make of
what they notice.”
What Readers Really Do

40. Share Timeme

46. Readicide by Kelly Gallagher
If we are to find our way again--if students are to become
avid readers again--we, as language arts teachers, must
find our courage to recognize the difference between the
political worlds and the authentic worlds in which we
teach, to swim against those current educational practices
that are killing young readers, and to step up and do what
is right for our students.
We need to find this courage. Today. Nothing less than a
generation of readers hangs in the balance.