“Use a Connection” at the beginning of a lesson.  Scaffolding on their prior knowledge is always a good idea in any lesson, regardless of what you are teaching.  The “connection” sets students up for learning something new by referencing prior knowledge that is relevant to the day’s instruction or by drum rolling the significance of the new instruction. 

Within the connection, introduce your “teaching point” to the class.  Say precisely what you intend to teach.  Remember to reiterate the key point and its importance throughout the lesson, especially in teaching literacy lessons.  This point needs to be worth remembering.  It needs to provide a strategy or a bit of important knowledge that they can take and use later.  I personally don’t like to say “Today I will teach you….” but below is an example from the Lucy Calkins program. 

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“Today I want to teach you that it often helps to ask, ‘What’s my story really about?’ and then to rewrite to stretch out the parts of the story that show that important idea.”.

Early on in a unit it is a good idea to rally students and to start off promoting the unit goals so students grasp the “BIG PICTURE”. 

A “Connection” should always shift directly into the body of the lesson that addresses the strategy.  Teachers usually begin the connection section by demonstrating.  The teacher may role play.  The role play is meant to function as a how-to or procedural guide, so the teacher acts out the sequence of steps that students will, hopefully, take.  The role play or demonstration incorporates practical how-to-tips. 

We need to ensure that we are conscious of the work that we do instantly and effortlessly, so that we can teach this to our students.  We take for granted things we do as mature readers/writers, that we forget sometimes to break steps down so they can learn these skills themselves.  The trick is to be explicit and clear without inadvertently describing it in a way that doesn’t ring true; this is something to check for and avoid. 

A lesson should have an “Active Engagement” section that starts with students assisting or trying out the technique just taught to them on their own or with the class.  It is important to name what students will be trying in a way that is transferable to the reading or writing they are doing.  Students can practice and do it over and over again here.

During the “Active Engagement” section, it is important to prompt them to lift the level of their work.   For example, if you taught students to make a movie in their minds while writing, you might prompt them by saying, “What happened first….?  What do you see…?  Who’s there…?  Then what happened…?”.   Keep your suggestions simple.  A goal is to have students prompt themselves as you are prompting them.  For a strategy to be useful, the learner has to be able to use it independently, without a teacher, later.  Therefore, make sure your prompts are the sorts that kids can internalize and use themselves.

“Turn and Talks” are crucial during these lessons, but it is important that they not only talk to a partner, but learn how to listen and talk back to each other’s ideas.  By teaching students to talk back to each other’s ideas, you also teach them to talk back to (and extend) their own ideas.  Intervene when conversations go south, and coach the whole class with more specific pointers.  Let students have a second go at whatever you would like them to practice. 

When you look at the success of your mini lessons, focus on whether it was memorable and replicable.  A lesson that contains a powerful anecdote or an apt metaphor, a teaching point that contains alliteration or rhyme, all make it memorable.  An example is to say “Information writers make containers for the information they want to teach their readers,” is more memorable than saying, “Information writers need to clearly structure their writing”.

Insure students learning is Cummulative.  It is important for the students to hold onto what they learned from the previous lessons.  We can do this by incorporating key terms from earlier minilessons into the new lesson.  Similarly, the charts and lists that we make are ways to organize, consolidate, and make available all the studetns are larning so that they can draw on the strategies in the midst of reading or writing time from day to day.  It can be a helpful strategy to refer to the charts during lessons, conferences and small group instructions.  These charts can eventually form helpful rubrics in future assignments.