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Saturday, August 10, 2024

FREE LANGUAGE ARTS LESSON - “CBCA 2024 - ‘Grace and Mr Milligan’ - Read Like a Reader; Read Like a Writer”

by Robust Reading Resources
3rd - 6th Grade




Please note:

The mentor sentences selected in this resource relate to the Australian Curriculum: English F-2 content descriptions, however, the "Read Like a Reader, Read Like a Writer" process involves higher order thinking around comprehension strategies and author's craft, making this resource most suitable for Years 3 and above.


"Grace and Mr Milligan" by Caz Goodwin is one of the shortlisted picture books in the CBCA 2024 Book of the Year Awards in Australia. It is such a sensitively written story about friendship, kindness, loss and hope. The illustrations work in partnership with the text and add depth of meaning to the story.

The purpose of this resource is to introduce the "Read Like a Reader, Read Like a Writer" approach through the use of a couple of mentor sentences from the picture book. It is designed to support explicit teaching and modelling by the teacher, rather than as independent handouts for the students.

As a teacher resource, it is designed for the teacher to firstly scaffold the explicit modelling of think aloud strategies related to comprehending the text (to "Read Like a Reader") and then to re-read the text through the lens of "Reading Like a Writer" to examine the author's craft. The resource innovates on and extends Steve Peha's original "Read Like a Reader, Read Like a Writer" approach.

Example think-aloud responses are included as possible suggestions only, as a starting point for teachers, to demonstrate how the resource is used.. Blank templates are included for teachers to model their own thinking with their class (which is preferred and more effective).

There are several variations included in the templates, as some teachers like to distribute an A4 handout to their students so that the students can annotate their own individual copies while the teacher is modelling, thinking aloud and annotating the text. The students fold the handout on the dotted lines so that the first engagement with the text focuses only on 'reading it like a reader' and recording thinking in the box on the left (using the prompts). In a follow-up session, the students unfold the right-hand side of the A4 handout while the teacher re-reads the text and models 'reading as a writer', or exploring the author's craft, using the prompts in the text box on the right.

One of the pages includes colour-coded transitivity based on a functional grammar perspective (green for processes, red for participants and blue for circumstances) and includes a new prompt in the 'read like a writer' text box for reflections about the grammar choices used by the author. This may be used with older year levels, with the familiar grammatical content from F-2.

Please refer colleagues back to this page to download the resource if they are interested, by sharing the link, rather than just forwarding the resource on or giving it away. I would sincerely appreciate that.

Other free resources like this will be uploaded in the coming weeks, by following my store you receive notifications when they are uploaded (click on the green star under my store name at the top of this page, where the hyperlink says, "Follow me").

You are more than welcome to join us in the Picturebook Fanatics - Children's literature & critical literacy FB group where we share curriculum-related ideas, like this, for using children's literature in the classroom.

#CBCA2024 #mrmulligan #readlikeareader #readlikeawriter #australia #picturebooks #cazgoodwin #cbca





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