Mini-Lesson Makeover: Giving your Connection a POP!

Mini Lessons at this point in the run the risk of being a little....dull if we aren't careful! One thing I've been trying to do is raise the level of interest in my connection! Generally, most mini lessons start with the old...
"Yesterday readers, we..." or "We've been learning how to..." and we state the prior day's teaching point to review. And that is great. Normally. But I thought if I could actually make a "connection" in my connection, make the kiddos will stick with me a little longer??

Below I share some connections that I've been using lately...



* One time my family was driving out of town. We were going to see my friend. We’d never been there before but we looked online at the map to sort of get an idea where we were going. As we were driving, we were talking about all sorts of things. We weren’t really paying attention to the directions like we should have been. I started to look around and I just sort of knew something wasn’t right. The signs on the highway weren’t saying what I expected them to say. We had to finally admit that we were LOST. Sometimes the same thing can happen in our reading! You might be reading along and you sort of stop paying attention. Then you realize that you might be LOST in your book...

*My best friend in college was a runner. Every morning she got up early to go for a run. I noticed that she always got dressed, put on her tennis shoes and instead of leaving right after that, she always took a few minutes to stretch and warm up. She told me that she needed her body to wake up so she would have a better run. Today I'll show you how reading can be the exact same way! ...

*One time I got an email from a friend. We had plans to meet up over the weekend but there was supposed to be a big snowstorm. I emailed her to say that I didn’t think I’d make it because of the snow. She understood but in her email, she mentioned that she didn’t think the snow would be that bad and she told me that she cancelled all of her other plans. I had some inferring to do. Using the evidence that she gave me in her email, I was able to realize that she was really disappointed. She didn’t come right out and say that she was disappointed but I could tell because she made sure to tell me that she cancelled her other plans. Readers can do the same thing. Sometimes you will have to infer how a character feels by thinking about how they feel based on the words they say...

The really cool thing is- now that I've started to make my connections a little more personal- the kiddos are hooked in so much more quickly. They also started catching on to how my real-life examples apply to reading. Halfway through my story about getting lost and needing to stop for directions, I had some kiddos say, "that's can happen when you are reading!"

Happy end of the year push!