Mini-Lesson

Students will practice paraphrasing what they read.

1. After reading and discussing the timeforkids.com news story Lighting the Flame ask students to restate in their own words what the story is about. After taking a handful of responses tell students that readers can better understand what they read by thinking about how they would explain the article to someone else. When students paraphrase, or retell, a story in their own words, it also helps them to retain information.

2. Have students go back to the article and underline what they think are the most important facts in each paragraph.

3. Next, have students take turns paraphrasing these facts. Structure this part of the mini lesson by having one student share aloud a fact from the story and another student restate the fact.

4. For homework, have students tell an adult what they learned from today's timeforkids.com news article.