Overview

Curriculum Selected: 

The Reading Mini Lessons Book– Your Everyday Guide for Literacy Teaching

Authors: Irene C. Fountas & Gay Su Pinnell

I am a first year 3rd grade ELAR teacher and I was given this curriculum to help me create mini lessons and small group lessons within my classroom. Therefore, I wanted to choose a curriculum I am actively using to for this activity. 

Unit Selected: 

Literary Analysis Minilessons: Thinking and Talking about books. 

Categories within the unit:

1. Fiction and Nonfiction

   1. general

   2. genre

   3. messages and themes

   4. style and language

2. Nonfiction

   1. genre

   2. organization

   3. topic

   4. illustration/graphics

   5. book and print features

3. Fiction

   1. genre

   2. setting

   3. plot

   4. character

   5. illustrations

What is taught before this unit is routines for thinking and talking about reading and working together in the classroom, and how to engage into content.

I selected this unit because it is a unit I have been using a lot in the last month as I have been teaching nonfiction to my students.  

Curriculum Goals:

The goal is to teach students to read. The curriculum states, “THE GOAL OF ALL READING is the joyful, independent, and meaningful processing of a written text” (pg. 1). 

The goal is to produce successful experiences in reading independently the texts for young readers as they work towards efficient processing of texts. 

The book uses a multitext approach and listens to written text read aloud, and talks about shared texts to extend comprehension, vocabulary, and knowledge of the ways written texts are presented and organized (pg. 2). 

The goal of all the reading instruction is to enable the young reader to engage in effective, efficient, and joyful independent and meaningful processing of written text every day in the classroom. 

For what age students was this curriculum made?

This is a 3rd grade literacy book. 

Unit Assessment Outcomes: 

To help students think and act like readers and to build effective processing strategies while reading continuous text independently.

More specifically this unit supports students in a growing awareness of the elements of literature and the writers and illustrators craft. This unit helps students learn how to think analytically about texts and identify the characteristics of fiction and nonfiction genres.

Things they will learn:

• characters and how they change

• identify problems and solutions in stories

• how notification writers present and organize information as well as their use of graphics and other nonfiction features 

Teachers record and check minilessons they have taught so that they can reflect on the work of the semester and ready by using a record-keeping form to take notes for reference on the unit. After each learning umbrella (a few mini lessons), teachers use the assessment section to assess students' learning. There are guiding questions to help determine the strength and the next steps for your students. 

Stakeholders:

The teachers are the decision makers when it comes to deciding what to teach. The teachers teach within what Vygotsky calls the students “zone of proximal development”, and it is up to the teacher to assess and decide what the students can do independently and what they can do with the support of another. The students are mainly impacted as they are given the skills to be better readers. Where I think teachers are mostly impacted is in the first unit of how to work together in a classroom as a teacher is able to set up the foundations for teaching reading in the classroom. 

21st Century Classroom:

There are a lot of examples of how to engage your third grade students in developing the behaviors and understandings of competent readers. Yet it also gives modifications to fit your students and ideas to construct new lessons still using the goals of the unit. 

The curriculum also gives you a website to find more resources to adapt to new texts you personally bring forth to your students. The curriculum does a great job from the beginning to support collaboration and communication within the classroom through the lessons taught. I also like how this unit teaches productivity to the students as they work on self-efficacy. 

The curriculum could adapt more 21st century skills by teaching research which is a third grade TEKS. I also think that this curriculum teaches a lot of formal literacy communication, but not informal and so they can adapt those into the curriculum such as email writing.