The purpose of this mini-lesson targeting sixth grade students is to facilitate improvements in reading comprehension through writing and revising drafts of alternative rewordings of information taken from a text. The task is essential to reading comprehension because as noted by Robb (1999), genuine reading comprehension is perhaps best reflected in the capacity of students to retell what they have read and to do so in a way that demonstrates their engagement with the primary text, their understanding of its concepts, and their ability to employ alternative phrasing, logical organization, point of view, sentence variation, and other language techniques in an effective manner. Similarly, Gallagher (2003) suggests that reading is not understood as isolated from writing and that mini-lessons are instrumental in helping a teacher to convey strategies to students that will be used often.
The specific objectives for this mini-lesson are:
. By the end of the lesson, students will be able to apply the conventions of grammar to retell a story derived from a fictional work with 90 percent accuracy.
. By the end of the lesson, the students will be able to identify ideas found in the original text and to revise those ideas to create a document that precisely as well as vividly expresses the original content with 90 percent accuracy.
This mini-lesson was designed for sixth grade students using the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards for language arts depicted below:
LA.6.3.3.1: The student will revise by evaluating the draft for development of ideas and content, logical organization, voice, point of view, word choice, and sentence variation;
LA.6.3.3.2: The student will revise by creating clarity and logic by rearranging words, sentences, and paragraphs, adding transitional words, incorporating sources directly and indirectly into writing, using generalizations where appropriate, and connecting conclusion...