I’m hearing some online grumbling about Writer’s Workshop lately, specifically how you come up with mini-lessons.

The good news…you don’t have to have a book to give you mini-lessons (although I can recommend a few)

On the first day you model for students how you write but after that, your mini-lessons come from assessing your students. For example, if most are having problems on using periods, your mini-lesson is on using periods. If students’ sequencing is unorganized, then you teach sequencing. It’s not brain surgery.

You do the blue section of Open Court as directed but students are not going to master a blue section skill after seeing it once. Whenever you see a problem recurring for more than one person, that’s when you visit it for two or three minutes in a mini-lesson before students go off to do their writing.