Week 5 in E339 - Mini-Lessons

In class this week we did a unit of study on a subject and did a mini-lesson to go along with that unit.  I did my unit of study on ABC books with Sami.  I thought it was a great assignment and good to think through how we would do a mini-lesson to connect to a picture book in the classroom.  However, it was much different presenting a mini-lesson to a group of college students whose knowledge far surpassed that of a group of second graders. Their attention span also probably was a little longer than a group of little ones.  For my mini lesson I began by asking the class an array of questions that discussed what made up ABC books and ideas for their own ABC books.  I then gave students a chance to look at different examples of ABC books and read an ABC book to them aloud.  Then, I was going to have my students create their own ABC book using an adjective that begins with each letter of the alphabet.   And with those adjectives, they would create sentences that gave examples of how to use those adjectives.  Finally, they would create a final draft of their ABC book including the sentences they used and a picture to represent that adjective.  Overall, I really liked this assignment because we were able to create our own mini-lesson that was centered around a picture book.  There are a lot of lessons that can be created from a simple picture book, especially older children, which we often think picture books are too old for.  Since we have been reading about min-lessons the past couple of weeks, it was good to get our own experience in creating our own!