Text-to-Text Minilesson with Smart Board Example

In many of my blog posts I mention minilessons.  I receive a lot of e-mails and comments from readers of my blog asking about how I manage all of my middle school students in a Reader’s Workshop format.  Below is an example of a minilesson that I recently did with my students.  I use my Smartboard on a daily basis to take students through the minilesson process. I begin each day in Reader’s Workshop with a book talk.  This is simply a short one-two minute plug for a book.  I try to vary genres and levels of difficulty with the books that I select.  During book talks I sometimes read the back cover, read an excerpt from the book, talk about the characters, setting, theme, etc.  I also have students sign up on a calendar and have one student per day give a book talk at different points throughout the year to give myself a break and let them get recommendations from their peers. The minilesson was built off of the Common Core State Standard RL.8.5: Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style and RL.8.1: Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says exlicitly as well as inferences drawn from text. Each minilesson begins with the minilesson statement which is framed Readers (skill, processing strategy, etc.) so that (the why).  I have students copy down the minilesson into their Reader’s Notebooks.  It becomes our objective for the day,  It sets the purpose for our learning. The next portion of the lesson is the modeling piece.  When I model for students, I literally ask myself what I’m asking students to be able to do that day and step into the role of a reader and complete that task to share with students how I would complete it.  This is something that I’ve added into the way I teach over the past three years.  Modeling for students what you will be asking them to do is a great scaffold for struggling readers, and also sets a high standard for advanced readers.  For modeling in Reading Workshop, it is so important to model with texts that all students are familiar with.  All students in my class have had The Tiger Rising and Out of My Mind read to them through Interactive Read Aloud (IRA).  This is just one of the reasons why IRA’s are such an integral part of the Balanced Literacy framework at any level. The next part of the minilesson is the “have-a-go” which is where students are involved in getting a little bit more support in relation to the minilesson before taking on the minilesson independently.  The have-a-go could involve a turn and talk with a neighbor, a share out with the whole class, etc.  For this particular minilesson, I chose to create a list as a class of possible ways that texts could be connected together.  This is what my class came up with. I reserve the final four-five minutes of our Reader’s Workshop time for a share.  When I first made the shift from the traditional middle school novel units, grammar worksheets, and essay writing into balanced literacy, I thought the share portion of the minilesson was kind of pointless.  In turn, I cut it out far too often.  Once I decided to incorporate the share on a consistent basis, I saw a major change in my students.  They had higher motivation toward their reading and writing, they transferred our minilessons into their reading and writing more effectively, and I as able to do a quick formative assessment of my students.  The share is such a valuable time and instrumental in creating a community of readers and writers in your classroom. For a downloadable file of the text-to-text template and my modeling as shown in the Smartboard slide, visit my TpT store and download the freebie by clicking here.