Literacy Workshop: Parts of a Mystery

In my Montessori elementary class, we study writing and reading at weekly Literacy Workshops where students participate in small-group themed activities. Recently, I shared with students a lesson called Parts of a Mystery, identifying the main characteristics of this genre:

·      A question or problem

·      Something strange or unexpected

·      A secret

·      Something missing

·      A curious detective

·      Clues and predictions

·      Distractions

·      Suspense

·      Conclusion

The Parts of a Mystery were printed on white paper with a black background, enclosed in a pouch from Out of Print, adorned with many faces of author Edgar Allen Poe. I also had a basket of magnifying loops, a raven finger puppet from Folkmanis, and a copy of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Madness. We discussed the Parts of a Mystery, then I asked older students (in my age 6-9 class) to select two younger partners to read one of the following books:

·      The Mystery by Maxwell Eaton

·      Hermelin, the Detective Mouse by Mini Grey

·      Ginger and the Mystery Visitor by Charlotte Voake

·      The Strange Case of the Missing Sheep by Mircea Catusanu

·      Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty? And Other Notorious Nursery Tale Mysteries by David Levinthal

·      Fog Island by Tomi Ungerer

·      Quest by Aaron Becker

Each group had a grid sheet with the Parts of a Mystery on it, and each student had a different role to play:

·      Reader (oldest child),

·      Detective (usually the youngest child – who got to use the loop), and

·      Scribe (usually the middle child, if s/he was a confident writer).

After fifteen to twenty minutes, the groups had finished reading and worked on identifying the Parts of the Mystery grid sheet about the book they had read. We then returned to circle, and each group had a chance to share aloud about their Mystery. At the end of our lesson, I shared an episode of The Simpsons where the cartoon family re-enacts Poe’s poem “The Raven”. Students loved this multi-media and multi-sensory lesson, which allowed them to understand this expansive and intriguing genre of popular literature!

Literacy Workshops: Predicting

Reading is a crucial skill for acquiring information, developing critical thinking skills, encouraging compassion, forming logic, making choices, and navigating the unknown -- not only in school, but in the larger world, as well. Reading involves two main skills -- decoding (the ability to decipher and reproduce sounds in isolation or combination, then in word form) and comprehension. Many parents consider their child's decoding skill as the main aspect of reading ability. While phonemic awareness is very important, comprehension involves many more sophisticated abilities -- such as reading pictures for context clues, making mental images, identifying key story elements (characters, setting, plot, etc.), retelling, predicting and inferring, solving problems, relating the text to oneself or the world or other books, and demonstrating understanding through re-creations or reports.

This year, we've been working on reading skills with our weekly Literacy Workshops, which focus on decoding, comprehension, and writing or pre-writing skills related to a read-aloud text. One of our first lessons was about Choosing a "Just-Right" Book. Students in my mixed age (first through third grade) Montessori classroom generated a list of ways to know if a book is too easy or too hard (shown above). Many elementary classrooms have leveled reading libraries constructed from an adult perspective, yet I have tried to avoid this so students develop independence and knowledge about themselves as readers. (The hand drawing is a reminder from our librarian about the "five-finger" rule: if you find five words on a page that are unknown or hard to decode, that book might not be "just right" for you right now.)

One of the students' favorite Literacy Workshops was about Predicting. At the start of a school day, I placed three carefully wrapped presents of varying sizes on a rug (shown above). At morning group, I told students that these were gifts for the class which we would open at Readers Workshop later that day. I also encouraged them to touch, jiggle, hold, or carry -- but not open -- the presents, so that they might predict what was inside. That afternoon, we first discussed the definition of prediction and how we predict what will happen in the future. On a white board, I drew a graph for their predictions and the reality of the actual prize, and we noted these (shown below).

One child opened each gift. The first was a magnifying glass (for observing), the second was a game of dominoes (looking for clues or patterns), and the third was a set of the Choose Your Own Adventure series -- wildly popular during my childhood. At the beginning of each book, there is a warning, which I read aloud in an ominous tone: 

BEWARE! THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER BOOKS. YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE IN CHARGE OF WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS STORY. THERE ARE DANGERS, CHOICES, ADVENTURES, AND CONSEQUENCES. YOU MUST USE ALL OF YOUR NUMEROUS TALENTS AND MUCH OF YOUR ENORMOUS INTELLIGENCE. THE WRONG DECISION COULD END IN DISASTER – EVEN DEATH. BUT DON’T DESPAIR. AT ANYTIME, YOU CAN GO BACK AND MAKE ANOTHER CHOICE, ALTER THE PATH OF YOUR STORY, AND CHANGE ITS RESULT.

The class broke into small groups, with an older student reading to the others, who voted on what path to follow when their book asked them for direction in the plot. 

When we came together about twenty minutes later, I asked students, "How did you make your first choice? What did you predict would happen? What made you think that would happen? Were you correct? Did you go back and read the outcomes of the other choices? What was different? Which ending did you prefer?" Reflection motivates metacognition (thinking about how we think), and students enjoyed adding a gesture to their new reading comprehension skill: whenever they predict, they stroke their chins like reading detectives. In the months since this lesson, our class has revisited Predicting when reading other books, and a parent mentioned to me that her child has started using this term at home, as well. ("I predict we will have chicken for dinner!") This means she is thinking about what she is thinking all of the time -- not just during Literacy Workshop!