We all make mistakes, and I’ve made plenty of them over the years with my reading mini-lessons. But as a result, I’ve learned some great takeaways. And lucky for you, I’m sharing the reading mini-lesson tips I’ve learned so that you can avoid making the same mistakes as me!
In this post, I’ll reveal my tips for more effective reading mini-lessons. You may also want to check out the following posts that are a part of the reading mini-lesson series:
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Teaching Tips for More Effective Reading Mini-lessons
Tip #1: Find Best Friend Books
Use familiar texts for your mini-lessons to save time. Lester Laminack discusses the idea of “Best Friend Books”, which are familiar books that can be used multiple times to teach new skills. These are books you’ve previously read during a shared reading or interactive read aloud, so students already know the story. This allows you to highlight a certain part of the text to teach the specific focus for your lesson. Since students already know the text, they can focus on the strategy rather than trying to comprehend the story.
You may want to have 5-10 best friend books that can be used to teach a wide variety of skills. Collaborate with your teammates over the summer to share your favorite mentor texts. Discuss the skills that can be taught with these books. Try to select books that can be used for many different skills. Narrow it down to 10 books or less that can be reused throughout the year. Make sure to include a combination of fiction and nonfiction texts.
Tip #2: Plan Ahead with Sticky Notes
Prepare your prompts prior to teaching the mini-lesson. This helps you stay focused on one teaching point rather than mentioning multiple skills. Place sticky notes in the book to indicate your stopping points with your specific prompts already written out.
You can even create a collection of mentor texts that are planned and prepared for use. Write out the stopping points on sticky notes and keep them in the book, so they’re always ready to use. It’ll save you time each year from trying to remember the stopping points and prompts you had previously used. You may even want to work with your teammates to create a collection of prepared mentor texts.
Tip #3: Be Selective and Purposeful
The amount of possible mini-lesson topics can be overwhelming. It is impossible to teach ALL of these topics within a given school year. Time is especially limited because you’ll need to teach the same strategy over multiple mini-lessons before students begin to internalize it.
As a result, you need to be very selective about which topics you address in your mini-lessons. Choose skills and strategies that will be most beneficial in helping your students grow as independent readers. You’ll also need to consider your required curriculum (state or district) to ensure you’re explicitly teaching the standards.
Take into consideration the needs of ALL students. Mini-lessons are designed for whole group instruction so they need to address the needs of your wide range of learners. Small group instruction and reading conferences are opportunities to teach additional topics based on students’ independent levels.
Tip #4: Plan Umbrella Lessons
Fountas & Pinnell suggest the concept of umbrella topics when it comes to planning your reading mini-lessons. You may have an overarching topic you’re teaching that is comprised of several specific strategies. For example, the umbrella topic maybe teaching students how to engage in discussions about a text. The small strategies may include: being a good listener, valuing different perspectives, and respectfully disagreeing with another’s opinion.
Be conscious of how you are grouping your mini-lessons. Quite often these individual strategies build off of one another. Make sure you are planning them in a logical order to provide students with the foundation needed in order to be successful with the strategies.
Tip #5: Co-Construct Anchor Charts
As tempting as it is to use premade anchor charts, they don’t provide as much value to students as charts that are created together during the mini-lesson. By co-constructing charts with students, they have more ownership of the strategies, refer back to the charts, and are more likely to internalize the skills. Ultimately that’s the whole point of an anchor chart!
Additional Tips
These takeaways have all helped my colleagues and myself improve our reading mini-lessons. Our lessons have become more purposeful which in turn has made a bigger impact on our students’ success.
What tips have you learned through your reading mini-lessons? Please share any additional ideas or suggestions in the comments!
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