A mini-lesson focuses on a exact teaching point and lasts five to twenty minutes. You can teach a mini-lesson with a whole group, small group, or with private students. Mini-lessons are ideal for quick lessons important to active engagement.
Steps for Completing a Mini-Lesson
Before you plan your mini-lesson, you need to determine your teaching point. A teaching point is a exact objective. What will the pupil do? A teaching point might look like this: The writer will plump a topic for writing a nonfiction magazine article. Once you have a teaching point you can begin to plan your lesson.
Step One: Model
The first step in teaching a mini-lesson is to model what you want your students to do. If your teaching point is to get your students to plump a writing topic, then you must model choosing a topic. You could show the students a list of ideas for writing magazine articles that you brainstormed the night before. Possibly you have ten ideas on the list. Write the list on chart paper or place it on a corner device. Think out loud about your reasoning as you reconsider your topics. Which topic do you know the most about? Which topic is the most interesting? Which topic could you spend time writing without getting bored? Which topic has sufficient meat to categorically fill up description space? These are the kinds of questions you would ask yourself (out loud) for this singular teaching point. Your goal is to show your students how you eliminate topics and plump the best topic for writing. You could faultless this step in less than five minutes.
Step Two: Active Engagement
The next step in teaching a mini-lesson is to actively engage your students. Active engagement can range from turning to a partner and talking to a hands-on experience. The key word is "active". Students are engaged in convention (trial and error) while the educator monitors and assists their students. In the case of our teaching point on writing, students could work in partners to help each other talk through their writing ideas in order to choose the best idea. At the end of the session students should be ready to write. This step might take five to ten minutes.
Step Three: Sharing the learning Experience
Before you leave the mini-lesson behind and issue students to responsibility, bring your class back together (or meet with your small group or individuals) to share the learning experience. In the case of choosing topics students could share their writing topics with the rest of the class and tell how they decided on their topic. In this case, it's not the topic they chose, but the process they engaged in while choosing the topic. Don't spend more than five minutes for step three. You've got to get your students to work now! It's time to write (or read).
Mini-lessons are a great tool for holding your students engaged and keen along. Children are wired from television, video games, and the Internet to the point that they lose interest quickly. Shorter, keen lessons keep your students curious and your teaching fresh.
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