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Using Mentor Texts

Just as the director and designer create a stage setting that helps the audience understand and connect to a dramatic performance, teachers must create the environment in which students are challenged to read a wide range of texts deeply and thoughtfully. With the goal of deep thinking, teachers in this kind of learning environment invite responses and reactions, and stretch students’ thinking to levels of reflection they might not reach on their own.

Mentor texts are pieces of literature that you—both teacher and student—can return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to be studied and imitated...Mentor texts help students to take risks and be different writers and readers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats. They should be basically books that students can relate to and can even read independently or with some support. And of course, a mentor text doesn't have to be in the form of a book—a mentor text might be a poem, a newspaper article, song lyrics, comic strips, manuals, essays, almost anything.

Mentor texts are a powerful way to support specific teaching points in your instruction – reading and writing. They help teach your students to notice literary elements and the craft of writing. In Reading, mentor texts provide a chance for students to interact with the richness of language, most beautiful art, and most enticing story lines. In writing, mentor texts provide an inside view of authors’ work … they serve to show, not just tell students how to write well.

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Tips for Using Books as Mentor Texts:

Choose a text you enjoy. You will not only be reading this text with your students many times over (as a whole or in parts) but your students will be reading it and trying craft moves in writing or replicating their thinking in other books.

Plan read a-louds strategically. Read the book ahead of time so you can go back into the book and refer to the part you want to use during your mini-lesson.

Keep in mind what you are planning to teach. If you plan to highlight the importance of noticing how a character reacts when put in sticky situations, you will want a book that clearly demonstrates this

Break apart a picture book or a chapter book into smaller parts and just use a specific section during each of your mini-lessons during the week or unit.

Look to picture books, anthologies, and magazines. All of these resources are great places to find short texts that will be accessible to students as well as make it easier for you to gather multiple copies of the text.

by Sara Long | Feb 27, 2013

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Craft is the art of writing. Craft can be found in those intentional touches each artist layers into his or her work, leaving a “voice print” behind for any reader to find.

Craft has to do with word choice, so a rich and robust vocabulary is an important tool for writers. Writers are typically people who are enormously taken by words and consume them as listeners and readers in much the same way athletes and dancers consume food to nourish their bodies.

Craft has to do with attention to detail. Writers must be able to tell enough to move the text along. They must also be able to show enough to take the reader/listener along with the story on the same current that tugged at the writer. Writers are attentive people who take note of the world around them, especially the little things that other people might simply walk right past.

Mentor Texts in Writing

  • Mentor Students with Specific Craft Techniques:Choose a few mentor texts to teach a craft or strategy (could be something simple like dialogue, repetition or something complex like theme, suspense). Ask students, independently or in groups, to study the text and notice the way the author makes the craft interesting in the text. What does the author do? Why is that effective? How could you try it?
  • Use Mentor Texts to Demonstrate Teaching Point Strategies:Mentor texts show students a concrete example of a writing skill and strategy.
  • Teach Elaboration Strategies Through Mentor Texts:We often say “elaborate” or “add more detail”. Studying mentor texts and guiding students through the many different ways that authors elaborate can take the taboo out of the writing process. Give students the opportunity to study a text and identify (and then use) the different strategies to make a detail, topic, or character come alive.
  • Encourage Risk Taking:When students are in the revision stage, ask students to choose a part of their text that they would like to revise. Guide students to take a mentor text and try out a strategy in their writing. Start the scene over again using a strategy by an author.Build mentor texts and risk taking into the rubric or evaluation tool to encourage new writing techniques.
  • Encourage Reflection: After a student revises and publishes a piece, ask them to reflect on the mentor authors that they have used. Ask students to identify parts and sections of mentor texts and their writing that show the development of their writing process with mentor texts.Sample questions might be:How did the text help your writing? What did you learn about writing? Where can the reader see the mentor text in your writing?