Reading Workshop Minilessons
The reading workshop minilesson is an opportunity for the teacher to directly and explicitly instruct the whole class on a particular reading skill, strategy, or habit that will help students develop into independent, lifelong readers. One teaching point is emphasized and the lesson should be brief (5-10 minutes). Minilessons follow this basic structure:
| Architecture of a Minilesson Connection: Yesterday we… Today we are going to… Teaching Point: I want to show… OR We will examine… Active Involvement: Engage students Link: So today or whenever you… |
Most minilessons fall into one of three categories:
- Management/Procedures
- Skills/Strategies
- Author’s Craft/Literary Analysis
Strings of organized minilessons become “units of study.”
Kathy Collins’ Growing Readers: Units of Study in the Primary Classroom provides a wonderful starting point for developing reading workshop units. Her units of study include:
Readers Build Good Habits
- Management and procedural expectations
- Reading identities
- Taking care of books
- Understanding workshop procedures
- How to stay focused on our reading
- How to work with reading partners
- How to have a good talk with our partners
Readers Use Strategies to Figure Out Words
- Getting our minds ready to read
- Acquisition of print strategies
- Flexibility with print strategies
- Reading with fluency
- Choosing just-right books
Readers Think and Talk About Books to Grow Ideas
- Book talks with partners
- Retelling
- Envisioning, predicting, making connections, having thoughts
- Strategies for monitoring comprehension
- Strategies to fix comprehension challenges
Readers Pursue Their Interests in Books and Other Texts
- Genre studies and author studies
- Character studies
- Reading projects
- Determining importance, synthesizing text, inferring
Readers Make Plans for Their Reading Lives
- Reflecting on how we’ve grown as readers
- Making reading plans for the summer (and for life)
- Setting goals as readers
- Determining our new reading identities
The following are minilesson chart ideas that I have collected from various classroom. Click to enlarge.
