Mini Lesson + Overview + Learning Cycle explanation

Model for Mini Lesson:

Before we start with our mini lessons, we are going to learn about the Learning Cycle (LC). Originally developed for science classes, it also applies to teaching language arts. The classic LC has 5 E's:

1. Engage
2. Explore
3. Explain
4. Extend
5. Evaluate

We are going to add a 6th E:

6. E-Search (i.e., your students have to browse the Internet to find answers, or fill in an online grammar quiz, etc.),

because those of you who are going to teach will have to convey technological literacy as well as content knowledge.


Overview to Publish on the Blog as a New Thread:

The day before you hold your mini lesson, make sure you publish a SHORT OVERVIEW as a “new post” on this blog, indicating what you are going to do for the 6 E’s. This will help students who have missed the class to keep up to date with what we’ve been doing, and everybody to learn for the grammar parts of the midterm/final exams. Also, put the URL’s you will use for the 6th E (e-search) on this blog, so people can practice your grammar topic.

If your overview is missing, 30 points will be deducted from your mini lesson overall points (200). If for any reason you experience blogging issues, you must email your outline with the URL’s to all peers before your presentation starts; in this case, you can paste your overview onto the blog later when you’ve solved your issue. A non-posted or non-emailed overview before the start of the presentation cannot be made up.

First of all, choose an appropriate heading for your blog post about your mini lesson in the subject line, and also label it accordingly (there is a field at the lower right hand corner for “label”). The label enables your peers to use the search function and find your topic.

Then, define your self-selected age group of your audience. Your age-appropriate teaching style will be graded accordingly. That means, for younger grades you would have to choose more colors, a more child-friendly style, more break-ups, images, easier language, etc....

Your 6 E’s should generally be in chronological order, but if it fits you can combine two E’s (such as “explore” and “e-search,” if both actions take place in one step). Your “engage” is your attention-catcher, something to keep your students' motivation up; it can be a picture, a sound file, hands-on material, a joke/anecdote, a game, a wrong sentence where students have to find the mistake, etc…. be creative!

Your “visuals” can be writing on the board, handouts, graphic organizers, manipulatives (= hands-on material), etc.

Note that if you assign homework, your peers are not actually going to do it; but it will be graded as a good component (e.g., as “evaluate”). Just tell your peers what you “would” assign.



This is an example for an overview of my mini lesson on a special pronoun usage:


STEP 1: engage (= attention catcher) and explore (read about the topic by yourself)
To engage the students, we are reading a website about President Obama's most notorious grammar mistake: "They invited Michelle and I to a party...."

STEP 2: explain
I will explain that there are two ways to avoid this special pronoun mistake. I will draw a little table on the blackboard:


1st Way:
Leave out the other person. Instead of saying, "They invited Michelle and I to a party," say, "They invited ME to a party." Nobody would say, "They invited I to a party."
That's the easiest way!

2nd Way:
Ask "who" or "whom." This is more difficult, because many people have problems with this ;-)
If you can ask, "Whom did they invite to a party?", it refers to an OBJECT, and the personal pronoun of the first person in the object case is ME. "They invited Michelle and ME."
If you can ask "who," as in, "Who went to the party? - Michelle and I went to the party.", the "who" refers to a SUBJECT, and the personal pronoun of the first person in the subject case is "I." If you are prone to say, "Michelle and ME went to the party," that's grammatically wrong, although some people speak like this.

OBJECT = whom = me
SUBJECT = who = I

STEP 3: extend, evaluate, e-search
I am combining these three steps (you can do that, too). In order to extend the topic, the students will explore other sentences with this pronoun grammar issue. In order to evaluate my students, I will give them an ONLINE QUIZ. In order to let them to e-search by themselves, I will first do guided practice with the online quiz, and they will answer the rest of the questions by themselves on their own computers. They can do a self-check whether they were right or not.

Links for Sentence Diagramming

Below are two links for the diagrams of the sentences 5 and 6 from our pretest:

Big bright rainbows appear very often.

The ship of my dreams sank quickly on Tuesday.

Welcome & Introductions

Welcome to ENG300-2!!!

Our first blog post is an introduction. Please click on COMMENT and post about 100 words about yourself -- your major, your interests, your career..... ;-)