Theme: A Visit to the Library / Una visita a la biblioteca
This is a mini-lesson focused on a pre-reading activity; a visit to the library. None of the links included are affiliate links.
The main goal is to provide inspiration for your own creative process as a homeschooling parent, teacher, and tutor. Let’s get started!
A Visit to the Library
Objective: The objective of this mini-lesson is to get children excited about the library and the experience of reading at the library and taking books out of the library to read at home. We want to set up the activity of reading with an engaging pre-reading activity.
Focus Reading Skill:
- Activate and use background knowledge
- Generate and ask questions
Theme: The Library
Activity: Prepare for a visit to our local library, (school or home library) by creating our own library cards.
Book:
- Lola at the Library (English)
- Simona’s New Treasure (Bilingual)
Materials: Paper, pen, pencils, sharpie, ruler, scissors, template, (or index cards if you have them), stickers.
Strategy: These are the steps we are going to follow to complete the mini-lesson and achieve its objective. This mini-lesson can be broken down into three parts:
(When planning any lesson or activity I like to use the format of “before, during, and after” so that’s what we are going to use for this and all other mini-lessons).
Before:
Gather to read the book that we chose for the activity: “Lola at the Library”.
Ask “discovery” questions to get an idea of previous knowledge about the subject, and encourage children to share their experiences and questions. I like to use a KWL chart to guide this process.
Read the story and ask follow-up questions to assess comprehension. Ask the children for their first impressions of the story. Read the story again. (if using a bilingual book, you might read the book in the other language or say a few keywords in that language as you read).
During:
Now that we are fully immersed in our theme, and we all know the focus of our time together, let’s plan a visit to our local library, and talk about how we can prepare for our visit. Jot down any ideas from the children or ask one of them to serve as a scribe for the group.
Pull out and distribute the materials, and introduce the activity: “Our Library Card”
Here are some ideas you might want to use for inspiration to create your own. You can download these free resources from TPT. I’ve used many free and paid resources from that platform. It’s a great way to support the work of other teachers!
These are the library card templates I found that fit this mini-lesson perfectly: (Both options are free to download)
After:
Once we’ve created our library cards, we can brainstorm with the children a way to organize them; maybe inside a show box or another recycled box, a manila envelope, or a clear zip lock bag. These storage ideas could become a follow-up crafting project!
We could read a favorite book or our selected book for this activity again, and practice filling in our brand-new library cards!
The final step will be to set a date for our library visit, and put it on our calendar 🙂
Follow-up activity: as part of our family reading ritual, we could pull out our library cards for the last week or month, review and reflect on what we have read, and share recommendations/favorites with others.
I hope you enjoyed and found inspiration in this mini-lesson!
The Little Bookstore 
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