Mini Lessons

First Grade Classroom

Mini Lesson 1: For my first mini lesson, I wanted to to focus on the students' comprehension on books they were reading because I had noticed in the past that they do not have a problem reading the text, but tend to not remember exactly what happened or any big themes that were present throughout the story. I selected a few students that ranged from higher level to lower level readers to see if this would alter any feedback I received about their comprehension. I had the student's select one book from their browsing box (so I knew it was a book that was at their level) and asked them to take a "picture walk" through the story without looking at any of the words. After they completed this I asked them, "Based on the pictures you saw, what do you think this book will be about?" They all replied answers that could have easily matched the pictures they observed. I then asked the students to read their books to me. *These were done individually. When the student was done reading their book to me, I would ask, "Based on what you just read, can you tell me what this book was about?" I noticed that the students tended to start with what happened towards the end of the book and I would have to push their thinking by saying things such as, "that's true, but did anything happen before that?" Some students focused more on one or two details in the book, but one student was able to do a decent job at showing me he comprehended what he read with my prompting questions.

Mini Lesson 2: For my second mini lesson, I wanted to shift the focus to writing and having the students include more detail in their stories. This is an issue that my CT has been trying to overcome with the students for the past few weeks, but I wanted to give it a shot to see how difficult it was. I presented them with the "5 Finger Story", where the students were supposed to begin writing a story on whatever topic they wanted, but they had to include 5 different details, which they can count on their 5 fingers. I began by showing my selected students an example of what a "5 Finger Story" might look like. I had them go through the mini story I had written and point out the 5 details that I included. After we quickly discussed the importance of adding detail to our stories, I had the students attempt to write their own stories. I informed them that if they were unable to think of the whole story, that they could make a list of all of the things that happened or that they would want to include. One student made a good attempt at trying to make 5 solid detailed sentences, however the sentences all had the same beginning and just a new detail at the end. Another student was getting really upset that he could not think of a topic to write about, so he did not end up completing the task. This showed me that having students incorporate details in to their stories is not as easy as I thought it was. I thought that the younger students would have had an easier time because I assumed it was easy for them to use their imagination and just list off different details, but I now know that it is apparently not that simple.