Madesen Shippman

10/20/2015

Teaching Reading: Mini Lesson Format (Calkins, 2001)

Targeted Literacy Strategy or Skill: Questioning
Grade level: 2nd
Objective: The student will be able to ask beginning questions and categorize them to promote
understanding
Common Core State Standard/ PASS Standard: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.1
Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate
understanding of key details in a text.
Prior knowledge: (What students already know)
How to comprehend a story and how to think of questions to ask.

Observations/Rationale: (Before Lesson) What did you notice in your students work that let you
know this lesson was necessary? (This will be an approximation this semester.)
The rationale comes from a need for the students to realize some questions in a story will be answered,
others may need extra research, and then there are some that wont be answered at all but thats ok.

Materials Needed
Lesson from (Name your source including page number) Strategies That Work, pg.112
Mentor Text: Charlie Anderson by Barbara Abercrombie, illustrated by Mark Graham
Materials: readers notebook, printed chart to be placed over readers notebook page
Student Groups (whole/small group/partners): whole group- individual categorizing of questions
Mini Lesson Format:
Connect (AKA~ Anticipatory Set, Engagement/Pre-reading):
In recent weeks we have been learning about how our thinking and how it promotes
understanding. And earlier Ashley introduced us to how asking questions promotes understanding.
Now we are going to dive deeper into looking at questions and how it is alright if some of them go
unanswered.

Teach (Model/Explain)
We are going to start by setting up a page in our readers notebook. Open to your next available
page after the reading is thinking title. Lets title it Questions: Some are answered, some are
not. Now I am going to read this book Dr. Vasinda let me borrow titled Charlie Anderson by
Barbara Abercrombie, illustrated by Mark Graham. (Starts to read book- stopping at the title page)
By just looking at the cover and these title pages I have two questions that come to my mind,
Why is there a cat on the cover? And why is the book titled Charlie Anderson? So I am going to
write them on the page we just set up. As I continue reading I am going to stop at the end of each
page and we are going to write down the questions you have on the page of our readers
notebook. (reads the first page and initiates the first question.) On this page the question going

through my mind is why was the door cracked open? Does anyone else have any questions?
We are going to continue this process as we read the book, it is alright if we get to a part and there
are no questions. Some pages leave us with more questions than others do.
AFTER THE BOOK IS READ: I am going to pass out these charts that will help us to categorize
some of our questions. For example my first two questions were answered by the text. Would
anyone like to tell me how? Yes, the cat is on the cover because he is the main character of the
story and Charlie Anderson ends up being his name. I am going to write these questions in the
answered box. However, my question on why was the door opened just a crack was not
answered so we have options, it can go to the RS box because we need to do more research to find
out the answer or put it in the C box because we are still confused as to why the door was left
open. It is important to realize our questions may go in different categories because others have
more schema on cats than some of us do.

Active Engagement (AKA~ Check for Understanding: students try it out, teacher observes):
I will continue to read the text and stop at the end of each page and allow the students to ask
questions. Periodically asking for volunteers or inserting my own questions if they dont have any.
AFTER THE BOOK: I am going to give you a couple of minutes to categorize some of the other
questions we came up with as a class and add them to the chart.

Link (AKA~ Closing the Lesson [with accountability for the skill/process])
Before we finish up I want us to tape our chart categorizing our questions into our readers
notebook so we will always have a reference to go back to if we have a question about the
questions we think of when we read. For now on I would like us to remember that it is okay that
some of our questions will go unanswered but also that there are many ways to try to find answers
to questions when reading like using our background knowledge and doing more research.