Reading/Writing Mini-Lesson Template
Mini-Lesson Topic: Fluency: Reading with Prosody
Instructional Objective: Students will be able to read a passage from Charlotte’s Web, and will show understanding and correct reading of frequency words and prosody, by reading the passage out loud.
Materials needed: Copy of Charlotte’s Web, copies of various passages from the book
Connection | Yesterday we learned about… Quotation marks and their meaning. When an author uses quotation marks in their writing, it means that a person is speaking. Today, I’m going to teach you about/how to… Read out loud, using vocal cues for different speakers and how to use punctuation marks to read sentences differently. I am also going to teach you that the word dialogue means when people speak, which is shown with a sentence surrounded by quotation marks. |
Teach Mentor Text: Charlotte’s Web Anchor Chart: Show an example of a dialogue sentence, such as: The boy said, “I want some ice cream.” | Today, I’m going to show you how… To read out loud and be able to show, with your voice, how to read dialogue, dialogue between two characters, and narration in a book. Using… Quotation marks and punctuation as your cues. |
Active Engagement Turn and talk to partner | Now it’s your turn to try… Reading with correct prosody. I will have students work with a partner, and they will practice reading passages from Charlotte’s Web, using the techniques that we discussed together. I will expect to hear students speaking with various intonation and pitch to their voice, to model different character’s voices. |
Link | Today, I taught you how to… Read using prosody and intonation while reading dialogue in a book. I also taught you that dialogue is when a character speaks in a book, and how you can find that during your reading. When you go off to read today and every time you read, you’re going to… Read using different voices for each character, and the narration in the book. You will also know when each character stops talking and when the narration takes over. |
Independent reading time (Individual Assessment) | Students to conference with: Craig, Anthony, Domingo, Charleston, Vinnie, Da’Chi, Zoe, Quincy, Neveah, Erika Possible future teaching points: Students will be given time to read to themselves out loud and I will be sitting by each student, listening to them read out loud. I will try to read a sentence or two while the students are reading to me so that they can be reminded what correct prosody should sound like. |
Sharing (Individual) | Students to share: I will ask all 10 students that I am working with to read a few sentences out loud to the group. When a student is sharing, I will ask the rest of the group to listen and give them their full attention while they are reading. Focus: My focus here will be to have each student listen to each other’s reading and practice correct reading techniques themselves. |
Reflection:
When I taught my mini lesson, my CT wanted me to take a group of students out into the hallway, instead of teaching to the whole class. When I picked my students, I selected a few low, middle and high reading level students so that I could get a diverse group of learners. The reason I chose fluency and prosody as my focus was because I found that when I read with my students independently, many of them did not recognize speaking and quotations while they read out loud to me.
When I began the lesson, I had the students sit in a circle, on the floor, so that everyone could see and hear each other. I began by telling them that we were going to practice reading with quotations, since they had been learning about quotation marks the past few days. I asked the group if anyone could tell me what quotation marks meant, and two students explained to me that they show you when people talk, which was a good start to my lesson. From there, I read a few sentences of Charlotte's Web out loud, but I asked my students to pay close attention to my reading because they were going to tell me which group of sentences sounded better. I read the first group of sentences with incorrect or no prosody and read the second group of sentences with prosody. When I was finished reading, the students told me that the second group of sentences sounded better, and I asked them why it sounded better. One student told me that when I was "using voices, you could tell when people were talking," and another student told me that it "made him listen to me more."
From there, I passed out copies of pages from Charlotte's Web and we practiced, as a group, reading out loud with prosody. During this time, I noticed that a few of my lower level readers had a hard time concentrating on prosody because they were unfamiliar with most of the words that we were reading, so they were reading behind the rest of the group. I decided that we would read the same two sentences a couple of times so that everyone was able to become familiar with the words. I found that the rest of my students caught on to reading with correct prosody after the second or third time that we read the sentence.
After we read these a few times, I allowed my students to partner up or read independently so that they could practice reading with prosody themselves. I found that my lower level readers chose to partner up and my higher level readers chose to read independently. I thought that this was great because my lower level readers were able to help each other with sounding out unfamiliar words and read together. As I listened to each group, I found that they were doing pretty well. At first it took some students a few tries before they were reading correctly, but I did not really have to help anyone during this independent reading time.
I gave the students 7 minutes to read to themselves, and then stopped them so that they could share what they had learned. I asked the group if they wanted to read out loud by themselves to the rest of the group (to see if everyone was comfortable with it) and all of the students said that they would feel comfortable reading out loud. I began by reading few sentences, and we went around the circle and I asked each student to read three or four sentences, whichever they were comfortable with. It was great to see the students reading, and reading with correct prosody! I think that all of the students enjoyed listening to each other read, which was great because they normally do not get the chance to read to each other. Overall, I think that my mini lesson went very well, but if I could change one major thing, I would have liked to teach this to the entire class, instead of a group, so that all of the students could benefit from this lesson. If I had more time, I probably could have taken other groups of students out into the classroom and taught the same lesson, to accomodate my CT.
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