AHarrington

In the second part of Revisiting the Reading Workshop, the authors describe mini-lessons that teach the procedures of the reading workshop. The book suggests twenty days of mini-lessons to familiarize the children with the workshop environment. These twenty days determine the success of the workshop model. The book continues to give excellent ideas on strategic mini-lesson topics. We work on many of these in ESOL. For example, self-monitoring comprehension, pausing to recall details, and visualizing the text are all skills that an English student must master in order to be successful in understanding what they read in a second language. I would like to incorporate more of the "making connections" mini-lessons involving text to self, text to text, and text to world connections. Not only does this increase a student's understanding of the text he/she has read, it gives the student an opportunity to explore the text from his/her own unique world view.