KBKilpatrick

Chapter 4 deals with how to phase in the reading workshops beginning in the month of September, and even goes into detailed schedules for different grade levels.  These schedules show what your reading workshop should look like at a particular point in the first month of school and how much time should be alotted for the activities.  This chapter also touches on twenty days of mini lessons and how those lessons should be structured.                                

Chapter 5 discusses mini lessons on reading strategies and skills.  Reading strategies ans skill instruction is very important in the lives of young readers.  This chapter gives a mini lesson outline for teachers to follow.  Eight reading strategy lesson plans were given these included:  looking ahead, fix-up strategies, making connections, questioning, visualizing, making inferences, making it your own, and looking back.  There were also examples of each of these given in the chapter.  Topics fro mini lessons were discussed to show the skills that a good reader should automatically use as they read.

Chapter 6 continued to deal with mini lessons but delt more with the elements of the literature and techniques that authors use to craft his or her work.  Topics for mini lessons on literary elements ( plot, characters, setting, and theme) were given for teachers to use in targeting elements for instruction in good literature.  Example mini lessons to isolate separate elements and identify them were given in the chapter.  Literary techniques are important in that they help students to recognize how authors create text, structure the story, and use words to create sensory images.