Literary Essays: Writing About Reading
Grades 3-5
Lesson Overview
Session 1
Focus: Writers are readers who envision themselves in the story and live
vicariously through the characters
Teaching Point:
1. When we want to write about our reading, we first need to read as
deeply as possible and experience the story.
2. Demonstrate your thinking as you read aloud. (Spaghetti by Cynthia
Rylant) Show how you envision the story, make inferences and fill in
the details (sound, action, thoughts, feelings).
3. Choose a part of the story. Instead of thinking aloud, write a few lines
about how you envision the story and would fill in the details. Write as
if you were the author of the story.
4. Point out that textual details should inform their inferences and
visualization.
Session 2
Focus: Writers read with attentiveness to detail that can spark larger ideas
Teaching Point:
1. In order to write well about reading, essayists need to be alert to
details.
2. Demonstrate forcing yourself to pause and notice details that could
just zoom by when reading a text. (Reread – Spaghetti by Cynthia
Rylant) Record your thinking.
3. Have students read deeply as well as write their thoughts.
Session 3
Focus: Essayists read and write about details of the characters to grow
significant topics.
Teaching Point:
1. Explain that authors do not come right out and tell you a character’s
traits. Good readers pay close attention to details.
2. Demonstrate attending to the details of a story that will reveal a
character’s traits, motivations, struggles, relationships and changes.
(The Marble Champ by Gary Soto)
3. Create a chart of questions that can be asked to study a character
(p. 41).
Session 4
Focus: Writers elaborate on their ideas by using conversational prompts as
writing prompts
Teaching Points:
1. Create a list of thought prompts we use specifically when talking about
reading (p.53).
2. Dramatize a book talk about a familiar text that you incorporated
“thought prompts” into your conversation.
3. Explain that when we use thought prompts to talk or write about an
idea, we extend and revise our idea, make it more powerful, specific
and true.
Session 5
Focus: Writers analyze the ways authors deliberately craft the story to convey
the meaning.
Teaching Points:
1. Readers find important ideas in stories when rereading and asking the
questions, “What is this story really about?” and “What is the
significance this author wants to highlight?”.
2. Create a chart of questions to ask when reading with interpretation (p.
69)
3. Demonstrate reading with interpretation and asking questions about a
well-known text.
4. Explain that a writer’s choice of lead, details and places to elaborate is
influenced by their answer to these questions of interpretation.
Session 6
Focus: Literary essayists draw on their life experience to understand and
develop ideas about texts.
Teaching Points:
1. Writers write about reading so that books are more likely to matter to
them. Tell a story of when reading changed a person’s life or your
own.
2. Demonstrate how stories speak to us and to the issues in our lives
when we read and reread a text, thinking specifically, “How can this
story help me with my issue?”. (Spaghetti by Cynthia Rylant)
3. View a text through the lens of a specific life issue/problem that the
writers pretend to share in order to find personal connections to write
about.
Session 7
Focus: Writers select seed ideas, craft thesis statements and question and
revise their thesis statements to make sure they are supportable by the whole
text.
Teaching Points:
1. Explain that writers reread entries from their notebooks and star
possible seed ideas that could become a thesis.
2. Create a chart of questions essayists ask of a thesis statement (p.98).
3. Demonstrate testing possible thesis statements with questions and
revising them based on their answers. The thesis needs to pertain to
the whole text and can be supported with references to the text.
Session 8
Focus: Essayists plan their essays, revise their theses and supporting
paragraphs to make sure they contain evidence from the text.
Teaching Points:
1. Writers need to see potential problems with the planned boxes and
bullets of their theses based on the content of the text.
2. Explain that it is easier for writers to revise a thesis statement and topic
sentences than to revise a whole essay.
3. Demonstrate reading a thesis statement with a lawyer’s eyes,
scrutinizing the thesis statement, imagining implications and potential
problems.
Session 9
Focus: Essayists collect and angle mini-stories as evidence to support their
claims.
Teaching Points:
1. Essayists collect and file evidence that supports each of their
topic sentences.
2. Explain that writers are storytellers that need to angle their story to
highlight the idea they want to convey.
3. Demonstrate rereading a text and identifying parts that could make a
point and illustrate a topic sentence.
4. Explain the steps that literary essayists take: finding an episode,
extracting a sequence of events, recalling the main idea, telling the
story.
Session 10
Focus: Essayists use summaries to help them support their points.
Teaching Points:
1. Explain the elements of a summary (using a few words from the text in
a way that captures the tone and color of the text to tell the main
features of the story that capture the main character, story’s setting
and the main sequence of events)
2. Discuss the steps of summarizing
 Read and find the section of a story that supports the point
 Reread the section and think about how it could be told in your
own words
 Notice and underline the key words in the text
 Retell the section, trying to get the point across and recap a bit
of the story
3. Demonstrate summarizing a short episode from a known text.
Session 11
Focus: Essayist use lists to support their claims in order to write with
parallelism.
Teaching Points:
1. Explain that their lists contain their words, not the words of the text
they are referencing, and so they are able to bring out the angle of
their story.
2. Create a chart of types of evidence to support their claims.
3. Demonstrate writing a list.
Session 12
Focus: Writers study the choices authors make in their texts in order to find
evidence to support their claims.
Teaching Points:
1. Literary essayists pay attention to an author’s craftsmanship
techniques knowing that an author deliberately crafts a story in ways
that highlight the deeper meanings of that text.
2. Demonstrate rereading to study craftsmanship and how an author‘s
use of a literary device supports one of your ideas about the text.
(Things by Eloise Greenfield)
3. Review the optional ways to collect evidence to support their ideas.
Session 13
Focus: Writers study published literary essays in order to find structures for their
own literary essays.
Teaching Points:
1. Explain that before creating drafts out of their collection of evidence, it
is useful to read other writers’ work, examining what works well.
2. Using an enlarged text, demonstrate boxing the parts and noticing how
it is put together.
Session 14
Focus: Ways to write introductory and ending paragraphs, to import some
specialized lingo and to handle citations with more finesse.
Teaching Points:
1. Explain that once the body paragraphs are complete, writers need to
package and polish their essays by writing an introductory paragraph
with a lead that contains broad statements about literature, life, stories
or the essay topic.
2. Share examples of leads written for literary essays that begin broadly,
talking about big topics and then funnel down to the particular theory
that the essay will develop.
3. Demonstrate thinking of a lead by first thinking of the essay’s larger
landscape
Session 15
Focus: Writers will celebrate the literary essays that have been completed.
Teaching Points:
1. Compile an anthology of related literary essays by rereading and
sorting each others’ essays.
2. Writers give copies of his/her essay to two children. Launch book
talks, encouraging the readers to weave their views into the book club
conversation.