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Slice of Life Writing
http://johnnorberg.com/

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the writing workshop: learning under the influence of language and literature

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The website maintained by Lester L. Laminack.

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Mélanie Watt, a well-known Quebec author of renowned children's books such as the Scaredy Squirrel and the Chester the Cat series', visited Westmount Park Elementary School recently to read to students Watt presented to all Cycle I students at the school. Additionally, all Cycle 1 students at Westmount Park will receive a signed copy of one of her books.

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TP: What's your writing/illustrating process like?
MW: It starts with an idea and then I sketch. I draw on paper and add the colour on the computer. All the outlines are drawn and scanned by me and the colour is done digitally.
With Scaredy, I start with graphics and that's what builds the story. With Chester, it's kind of different because I start at the beginning and it's action-reaction, and it leads up to something. But I try to keep a theme in mind, and whatever comes out - whether it be a text or a joke or a visual - I work from there. It's like a puzzle.

TP: Do you ever get writer's block?
MW: Yeah, I try to work on something else. Actually, when I began writing the third Chester story, I was supposed to be working on a Scaredy book, but it was just not working. And that's where the idea of Chester writing his own story came from because he gets writer's block.

TP: What inspired Scaredy's traits?
MW: Well, I'm kind of like that - I grew up in a very cautious family - and I think people can relate to that. Everyone knows someone or has had these moments where they're very afraid to do things. I just thought it was a nice topic to explore because if you don't risk anything, you'll never know what you're capable of. But it's weird how life brings you full circle. You write something about fear (or not leaving your tree), but the project brings you out more; it makes you meet new people, makes you travel, makes you open up.

TP: What inspired Chester?
MW: I wondered what would happen if you want to write a story and a character pops in and says, "No, this is not how you're doing it" and just tries to take the attention. Kind of like siblings. I have a younger sister and I remember we were always struggling for the attention of our parents. "Who can do this? I can do that!" I also grew up with a cat and when I did my homework, she would climb over my papers and mess it all up.

But once I got a letter from a class that had drawn two circles of the personality of Chester and Scaredy, and what merged together was control freak. I thought that was super, but it made me think I'm this major control freak. If you look at all my characters (the bunny and Foxworth, the salesman), there's a control issue with all of them.

Do you have a favourite character?
MW: Scaredy and Chester are my two favourites. These are characters that come out at different parts of your life; they express something that you're feeling on a subconscious level you don't always know it. It's like therapy. Sometimes I hear the characters talking in my head because that's how I build the story.

TP: What kinds of feedback do you get from kids?
MW: They talk about ideas for other books. Sometimes they have drawings of Chester or Scaredy. Today a little boy said "What about Scaredy underwater?" and I said, "That's so cool! What would he be afraid of?" And they get all excited. I think that's what's fun about Scaredy: They're all graphics and lists so kids can easily get into that mind frame and start building their own ideas.

TP: What advice do you have for kids in overcoming their own fears?
MW: I always say that knowledge is power; the more you know about something, the less you fear it. So school is good! Stay in school and keep studying. I love it when kids say that Scaredy is exaggerating because it's a good question (even for adults) to ask ourselves about the society of fear that we live in. What should we really be afraid of and what's been kind of set up? Like how white do we really need our teeth to be? These are the different types of fears that we don't even notice anymore; we just go with it.

TP: Do you have any advice for kids who aspire to create their own books?
MW: Make your own book because that's pretty much how I started. I was at university and I did a project about colour and I invented Leon the Chameleon. And I did an actual mock-up with paper and scissors and that's how it started for me. When Scaredy came out, it just gave me the confidence to go in a different direction and that's really where I have more fun. Even when I was writing Scaredy, I had this feeling like, "What am I doing? What is this?" You always have that little voice in your head that can help you or stop you from doing things. So have to have the courage to try things and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but at least you tried.

TP: In your next book, Scaredy ventures into the world of camping. Can you tell us a bit about that?
MW: I did some camping this past summer and got to relive it as an adult looking at how kids react to it nowadays. I was really fascinated by the fact that kids want to stay connected. They want their technology; they don't want to go outside, necessarily. When I was young, it was the opposite. We were outside playing more, whereas today's generation might be more used to being connected and maybe don't know how to adapt to the wilderness. It's a different relationship and I wanted to explore that. Scaredy doesn't want to go outside because he needs to be connected; he needs to do his things in the way that he knows how to do them, but he discovers the advantages of letting go.

TP: What other adventures do you see Scaredy participating in?
MW: To space would be cool. In the city would be nice. I'd like to make a safety guide for Halloween; kids ask me a lot about Halloween.

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Interview with Scaredy Squirrel author Mélanie Watt - Today's Parent

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TP: What's your writing/illustrating process like? MW: It starts with an idea and then I sketch. I draw on paper and add the colour on the computer. All the outlines are drawn and scanned by me and the colour is done digitally. With Scaredy, I start with graphics and that's what builds the story.

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Mentor texts or anchor texts are any text that can be used as an example of good writing for writers. Writers use a mentor text to inform their own writing.

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Mentor texts or anchor texts are any text that can be used as an example of good writing for writers. Writers use a mentor text to inform their own writing.

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~Not only used for being read aloud
~Used during all three parts or workshop
~Doesn't have to be a book (can be article, excerpt)
~Can be student/class/teacher created
~Don't have to use the entire text can use the same book for multiple lessons
~Show students how to look for their own mentor text
~A tool to teach craft
~Text you know and love
~Text familiar with students
~Students want to write creatively like the mentor text
~Read it to love it first before using it for a mentor text
~Not a magic list of mentor texts, ones that you LOVE and use and call your best friends books

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Ever wondered what goes on in the special education resource room? Or how to help your students who are struggling and may need special education support? In today's post, I have answers for you!! One of my blog readers, special education teacher Krista Perine, has generously offered to answer your questions!

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Mentor Text: City Dog, Country Frog Analysis 

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Mentor Text: City Dog, Country Frog Analysis 

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Interview

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In spring, when City Dog runs free in the country for the first time, he spots Country Frog sitting on a rock, waiting for a friend. "You'll do," Frog says, and together they play Country Frog games. In summer, they meet again and play City Dog games.

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Book Review

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Friends come into your life from unexpected directions, friendships go through hard times, friendships sometimes end - these themes are explored in two new books using stories of a dog befriending a frog and a rabbit befriending a bird.

In "City Dog, Country Frog," Mo Willems, the author and illustrator of the much-loved "Don't Let the Pigeon . . ." series, begins the story as City Dog is liberated in the country on a springtime visit. Off the leash at last, the excited animal runs out into the woods and meets a frog sitting on a rock. The dog asks, "What are you doing?" "Waiting for a friend," the frog replies. "But you'll do."

Their friendship blossoms as they play doggy and froggy games, including one where the frog learns how to throw a stick so the dog can fetch it. City Dog visits the country in summer and fall, and each time the friendship deepens. Frog is finally able to admit to the rambunctious dog that he is exhausted by all the running around and suggests that "maybe we can play remember-ing games." So they sit on a rock and remember "jumping and splashing and croaking" and "sniffing and fetching and barking," a lovely way of evoking two very different creatures.

Winter comes, the dog bounds out into the snow, but the frog is nowhere to be found. When the dog visits again in the spring the frog is gone, perhaps forever. The dog sits despondently, missing his friend, but then a chipmunk asks him, "What are you doing?" to which the dog replies, "Waiting for a friend . . . but you'll do."

This is a story about happy chances and the rewards of being with a friend, as well as a story about surviving loss and moving on. The text is both efficient and beautiful, and with Willems's witty word play, it builds two clear characters rather than just two familiar animals - picture-book writing at its best.

The light-filled watercolors by the celebrated Jon J Muth, whose "Zen Shorts" was both a best seller and the winner of a Caldecott Honor, beautifully illustrates the changing landscape and emotional high points of the story. An image of the friends sitting together on a rock, dramatically silhouetted in blue against orange foliage, captures the stillness of their moment of "remember-ing." Another painting shows the frog clinging to the dog's head as the dog paddles across a pond and charmingly suggests the trusting relationship between them. Toward the end of the book, Muth draws the dog's face so that he has taken on the frog's rubbery smile - it's very funny, and I wish the realism in the whole book bent a little more in this way, to embody the sense of the dog's city cockiness and the frog's wry temperament that one gets from the text.

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City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems and Jon J Muth - Forever Friends by Carin Berger

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Friends come into your life from unexpected directions, friendships go through hard times, friendships sometimes end - these themes are explored in two new books using stories of a dog befriending a frog and a rabbit befriending a bird. In "City Dog, Country Frog," Mo Willems, the author and illustrator of the much-loved "Don't Let the Pigeon .

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Author Studies Help Children Write Better

Last month I was consulting in a school with some primary grade teachers. They expressed concerns about infusing mentor texts into their classrooms. I provided them with some language for developing theories about what an author is doing in a text, as well as links to booklists I've created and a book that serves as a guide to engaging in craft studies with children in grades K - 6. However, I felt as though they had many more questions about how to proceed with mentor texts.

Instead of reviewing a new text each week (this month), I've decided to spend all of the "Thinking About Mentor Texts" Thursdays for December talking about getting stronger with introducing and utilizing mentor texts in the classroom. I hope you'll join me on this journey of thought. I hope you'll chime in and lend your expertise by leaving a comment. I hope you'll feel more comfortable with the idea of pulling out a text and using it to teach many things to your students by the end of this month. In January, I'll return to my usual, Thursday, here's-how-you-can-use-this-text kind of posts. Until then, I'd like to start this month's mentor text posts off by thinking about author studies in a new way.

If you've taken a literacy course as part of an education program, chances are you've been asked to create an author study. When I was a pre-service teacher in grad school I wrote one about Leo Lionni. After I began teaching, and went back for my second master's, I co-wrote one about Patricia Polacco. I intentionally picked to co-write an author study about Polacco's Books since I thought they'd be interesting for my students to study. I've taught variations of that unit four times... in Reading Workshop. However, one year, I taught a variation of an author study within the context of Writing Workshop. The planning I did was similar to the way my former classmate and I structured our Polacco Author Study (as per our instructor, Kathy Brody's, expert guidance). Here's an overview of how you might go about planning an author study in
Writing Workshop, which is meant to strengthen your students' writing skills by studying a body of work by one author.

Based on what I learned from Brody when I took her "Literature for Older Children Class," these are things you'll want to flesh-out before you embark upon a Writing Workshop-based author study:

Author: Think about one author whose writing you admire. Be sure it's accessible for all of the students in your class (i.e., they should be able to read it independently so they can study the author's craft moves without your support).

Book List: Create a list of ten titles (e.g., picture books, short stories), written by the author you select, that your students will study. Make sure you can obtain at least two copies of each text. You can borrow additional copies from your colleagues, take them out of the library, or buy them. Scholastic Book Orders are great for ordering multiple paperback copies of Polacco's Books. However, if the texts you want to study are hardcover, you might consider writing a proposal on DonorsChoose.org asking for financial assistance to purchase the books you'll need.

Biographical Summary: It's important that you learn about the author your students are going to study. Many authors have websites where you can learn more about them. Additionally, you can consult books like Something About the Author (pictured below) or Speaking of Journals: Children's Book Writers Talk About Their Diaries, Notebooks, and Sketchbooks , which will help you get to know a writer better. Speaking of Journals, which I used for a Jacqueline Woodson Writing Craft Study when I taught in NYC, provided me with insight into the ways in which Woodson works as a writer. Finally, Appendix A in The Author Studies Handbook: Helping Students Build Powerful Connections to Literature (pictured below) is an excellent resource for sources where you can learn more about authors.

Data Wall: A large, in-class, bulletin board display where your students can track what they learned about craft as they read each book. A rough template follows below. Need ideas for craft elements to study? Check out I can write like that! A Guide to Mentor Texts and Craft Studies for Writers' Workshop, K-6 (pictured above).

Classroom Charts: Even though you'll likely create these with your students, having a rough idea of the types of charts you will want to create (and what might go on them) will help you as you prepare your minilessons.

Culminating Project: Think through the type of writing your students will do. Will they write narratives, memoirs, poetry, or something else? The final piece of writing should be similar to the author you're studying since the students are going to be studying one author's writing, which is most likely written in one genre. Also think about how you will assess your students' writing. Developing a rubric, alongside your students, based-off of the craft elements you studied together might be one way to assess them. However, not all students will try out all craft moves, so you might choose to assess your students on their quality of their writing rather than their attempts at mentoring themselves after the author. Additionally, you might have students synthesize what they learned about the craft of writing, from the author you studied, using the data wall to help them reflect on their learning.

Celebration: While I've heard of many people dressing up as their favorite character from the author's book for an author study celebration, an author study celebration in Writing Workshop doesn't lend itself to that type of finale. The celebration I hosted was a share of the students' published writing where each child shared an explanation of how they mentored themselves after the author the class studied. If you have a big budget, then shoot for the stars and try to facilitate an author visit!

Data Wall Example (things you might study in one author's books with your students):

Alliteration

Descriptive Language

Endings (circular, surprise, etc.)

Figurative Language

Lead (dialogue, setting details, action, etc.)

Punctuation (dashes instead of commas, use of ellipses, etc.)

Strong Verbs

Varied Sentence Lengths

Students would use index cards to paste into each section of the data wall that reflected their noticings about the way in which the author used each kind of crafting technique in their book. You might plan ahead by pulling two examples of each technique out of the story so you can provide students with examples of each crafting technique, for each book. This way, when students try to mentor themselves after the author you're studying together, they can use the data wall as a resource so they don't have to search for the line(s) where, say, Eve Bunting used figurative language in a few of her books.

Regardless of the author you choose to study, you want to teach your students to be better writers by learning from an expert. The qualities of good writing should continuously be discussed (i.e., conventions, elaboration, focus, meaning, structure, voice, and word choice).

Next Thursday I'll write about conferring with mentor texts.

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Author Studies Help Children Write Better

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Last month I was consulting in a school with some primary grade teachers. They expressed concerns about infusing mentor texts into their classrooms. I provided them with some language for developing theories about what an author is doing in a text, as well as links to booklists I've created and a book that serves as...

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Rational and structures powerpoint

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A powerpoint for support

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Writing Workshop requires us to know about the lives of those who write!

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Ralph Fletcher

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What Should I Write About?

I'm not a big believer in "story starters". I believe that the best ideas are living inside you. Your challenge is to dig them out. Do the writing only you can do. But every writer gets stuck from time to time so I've included a few ideas to jump-start your imagination. You might try to write about:
* Family story
* A particular tradition in your family.
* An artifact (arrowhead, ring, antique, etc.). Important objects in our lives often provide excellent material to write about.
* Special place: special room, attic nook, inside of a tree, scary closet. You might start by quickly sketching a map of a house full of memories. Mark those rooms where something important happened to you.
* Brother, sister, or special relative. Remember: think small. Focus on one aspect of that person, or one experience you had with him or her.
* Your place in the family. Are the oldest kid in your family? The youngest? Are you a middle child? An only child? Were you adopted?
* Best friend. (Did you ever get in trouble?)
* Moving. Did you leave behind a best friend when you moved from your old house?
* A disastrous time you had at camp or on a family vacation.
* Horrible haircut (or other mortifying experience)
* An injury. Did you ever have to go to the hospital
* Important first: your first day in school, the first time you rode a two-wheeler, etc.
* Favorite pet, or a pet you once had.
* When your family changed: your brother went off to college, grandma came to live with you, etc.
* What you are (or used to be) afraid of.
* One thing you never want to do again!

How To Use Your Writer's Notebook

Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you. You can write about:
1) What amazes/surprises/anger you
2) What you wonder about
3) What you notice
4) "Seed Ideas" or "Triggers" to generate stories or poems
5) Small details that intrigue you
6) Snatches of talk you overhear
7) Memories
8) Lists
9) Photos, articles, ticket stubs or other artifacts
10) Your own sketches, drawings or doodles
11) Quotes or inspiring passages from books or poems
Once you have gathered a lot of writing in your notebook, try the following ideas:

1) Reread to dig out the best material

2) Experiment with new kinds of writing

3) Try to write something beautiful but don't expect all your writing to be great. Give yourself permission to write badly!

4) Write about personal things-fears, nightmares, or dreams-that contain strong feelings

5) Write about writing Remember these tips:

* Keep your notebook with you so you can write at any place and time.
* Pull your notebook out whenever you have a few minutes with nothing else to do.
* The notebook you keep should reflect you. If you like to draw, draw in your notebook.
* Writing can be fun. Your notebook is a place to enjoy writing.

Prewriting Strategies For Your Writing

1) Write in Your Writer's Notebook. A writer's notebook gives you an easy, informal, no-pressure way to start thinking about a topic. Great for brand-new "seed ideas".
2) Talk It Out. Sometimes I'll get together with a friend to kick around an idea I'm thinking about. There's a little danger here-if you talk too much you can talk the mystery out of an idea. I have found that a little talk goes a long way.
3) List Ideas. Lists are a great way to gather material. The idea is to generate ideas. Don't worry if some ideas are better than others. And don't worry too much about getting the ideas in the right order.
4) Make A Web. You may have done this before. Put the main idea in the center, and make a "spoke" for each connected idea.
5) Make A Simple Time-line. I find this idea very helpful for writing stories. Jot down when each important event happened. Now, where do you want to start the writing? At the beginning of the timeline? In the middle? At the end?
6) Three by Three by Three. Give yourself three minutes to write three ideas on three different topics. Great for generating ideas.
7) Free Write. Give yourself a short amount of time (five to seven minutes) to jot down ideas, words, fragments related to a topic. If you doing this right your pen should never leave the page. One friend of mine calls it "Hot-Penning". Don't think: write! Let your pen go wild. Later you can go back and circle any parts you want to use.

Important Note:
I don't use each one of these ideas each time I write. (Often I just start writing.) You will probably find that some of these ideas work better than others. You will have to try them out and see which ones work best for you.

Ideas For Revising Your Writing

Many young writers think of revision as all hard work and drudgery. But revision is more than just a way to fix a broken piece of writing. It's also a way to honor a good piece and make it even better.
Here are some ideas to experiment with:
* Change the beginning: experiment with different kinds of leads. You might try sound effects, or an intriguing first sentence.
* Change the ending: maybe a circular ending, for example, or a surprise ending might work best for your writing.
* Add a section. Have you left out something important?
* Remove/delete a part. A piece of writing is like a rose bush-it grows healthier after you prune the unnecessary parts.
* Revise for voice. Are there places in the writing where you stop sounding like you and start sounding like someone else?
* Change the order. You don't have to tell the story in the order it happened. Try starting in the middle, or try starting at the end and flashing back to the beginning.
* Change the genre. The story you are working on might work better as poem, an information piece, or a letter.
* Change point of view. Try telling the story through the "He" or "She" point of view, instead of the more common "I".
* Change the tone: make it funnier, more sarcastic, more serious.
* Change the tense: from past ("I walked in to the house") to present tense ("I walk into the house"), for example.
* Slow down the "hot-spot" or crucial moment of the story using dialogue, emotion, and frame-by-frame detail.
* Break a big topic (All About My Family, for example) into chunks or chapters. Think of each chunk as its own piece of writing.

Publishing Your Work

You don't have to have a book in the bookstore to be published. Getting published means "going public" so your words and ideas can be communicated to many different readers.

Here are some ideas for how you can do that-I'm sure you will think of your own ways.
1) Photocopy your writing and share it with friends or family.
2) Mail your writing to someone special. You could take a poem, make it into a card, and send that.
3) Tape yourself reading your story or poem and send the tape to an interested reader, adult, relative, etc.
4) Use your writing as the basis for an illustrated picture book for a younger sibling, or friend.
5) The school newspaper, yearbook, or local newspapers often publish student work. Find out what kinds of writing they publish, and how they want you to submit it.
6) Magazines that publish work by young writers include Cricket, Stone Soup, and many others. See if your librarian has a copy. Read the magazine carefully to see what kinds of things they publish. Might your writing fit in this magazine?
7) Check out contests put on by bookstores, local organizations, magazines, or national groups.
8) For information/nonfiction writing, you can make a "Teaching Poster" and post it in a place where people will read it. Study the teaching posters in your classroom before you make your own. **You'll need your teacher's cooperation for this last idea:
9) Classroom Author's Day. Some classes have one on the last Friday of every month. Chips, cookies, ginger ale make this a special occasion. Set a deadline and make sure everyone works toward it. Allow time for each student to read a short piece out loud. Give classmates and guests 3 by 5 inch index cards so they can write a response. At the end, each reader gets to read the stack of response cards. Author's Day celebrations can be a blast but there's a lot to do to get ready: write invitations, invite special guests, send out a press release to the local newspaper.

Recommended Books For Young Writers

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS by Sandy Asher (Walker & Company).

IN YOUR OWN WORDS: A Beginner's Guide to Writing by Sylvia Cassedy (Crowell). ?A thoughtful book jam-packed with terrific ideas for your writing.

MARKET GUIDE FOR YOUNG WRITERS by Kathy Henderson, Betterway Publications, Inc., PO Box 219, Crozet, Virginia, 22932. ?This book has a wealth of information about magazines, contests, etc. Lots of smart advice if you hope to get your writing in print!

LIVE WRITING: BREATHING LIFE INTO YOUR WORDS by Ralph Fletcher(Avon Books For Young Readers). This book is a sequel to A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK. It will show you how to improve the different parts of your writing. There are chapters on how to write a strong lead, how to craft an effective ending, how to bring alive your characters, and another one on how to write with voice.

The MEET THE AUTHOR SERIES published by Richard C. Owens Publishers. This series gives you a close-up look at many authors you will recognize.

The AMELIA BOOKS by Marissa Moss (Tricycle Press): AMELIA'S NOTEBOOK, AMELIA WRITES AGAIN, AMELIA TAKES COMMAND, and others. Written with a kid's zany sense of humor, these books crammed with wonderful ideas for young writers.

The WriteSource 2000 Books. Good, all-purpose, inexpensive books with information different kinds of writing.

POETRY FROM A TO Z: A GUIDE FOR YOUNG WRITERS by Paul B. Janeczko (Simon & Schuster). Also A SCH0LASTIC GUIDE: HOW TO WRITE POETRY by Paul B. Janeczko (Scholastic). Paul Janeczko has solid advice for anyone who writes poetry.

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I'm not a big believer in "story starters". I believe that the best ideas are living inside you. Your challenge is to dig them out. Do the writing only you can do. But every writer gets stuck from time to time so I've included a few ideas to jump-start your imagination.

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A whole collection of resources!

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Posts about mentor texts written by Melanie Meehan, Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski, Stacey Shubitz, Amy Ellerman, BethMooreSchool, Therapi Kaplan, guestteacher, Betsy Hubbard, and Lanny Ball

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The basics of workshop

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A Day in the Life of Our Writing Workshop

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Describes a day in our first grade writers workshop.

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Talking out ideas to begin a book

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When to add periods

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from Sit Down and Teach Up by Matt Glover and Katie Wood Ray

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I have streamlined my conferring toolkit over the years, partly in an effort to be more effective and productive during those time-challenged sessions when I have just a few minutes to convey an important teaching point, and partly in an effort to maintain my sanity. After all, even as I am conferring, I am also paying attention to the 25 other kids in the classroom - the student who has developed an unusual interest in the pencil sharpener, or the one who seems to be making frequent trips to the water fountain, for instance. As every writing teacher knows, we have less than ten minutes to assess a student's need, figure out a strategy, share it, assess if it "took", practice a bit, clarify, and then send off the student to give it a go. I better be able to find what I need in that toolkit!

Two elements form the very heart of every conference: the student, and the mentor text I can use to nudge her writing piece forward. A mentor text is a powerful tool to make a writer's thinking visible, and in doing so, share something concrete from which to model a craft move. I think Ralph Fletcher said it best in a Choice Literacy podcast he did not so long ago:

"I think that you need to see somebody doing something in order to do it well yourself, whether it's baking bread, whether it's skiing, whether it's writing. And I think writing is very complicated, so when you read a powerful piece, what's really wonderful about that is you see it in its gestalt, all fitted together. You still need to, at some point, break down the individual - it's like wanting to be a dancer and going to see the ballet. You're inspired. You may not be able to do many of the moves that they're doing on stage, but you definitely need that as your head as you try to become a better dancer."

That is the function of mentor texts in my conferring process - to share how good writing is structured carefully with each part integrated into the whole with thought and care. Here are some elements to think about when gathering examples for writing conferences:
Find texts you love and know well:
I've discovered that it's not necessary to find the latest fabulous picture book or memoir to use as a mentor text. The better you know a piece, and the more you have studied its parts and come to understand and appreciate its craft, the more effective you will be in making your teaching points with clarity. Jim Howe's "Everything Will Be Okay" (from When I Was Your Age, Volume One: Original Stories About Growing Up) , Lois Lowry's Looking Back, and Mario Cuomo's picture book The Blue Spruce, have been the only texts in my memoir tool box for many years now. I know them by heart, and have figured out the many writing moves each author made in order to create powerful and moving narrative structures. When I bring these texts to my conferences, I know exactly how I can use them to help my kids with their own drafts and revisions.

It's the quality not the quantity:
We are blessed to live in an age of gifted writers dedicated to the idea that children and young adults deserve great literature. As wonderful as that is, it can also be a problem - sharing too many mentor texts with our kids can be confusing and distracting. The focus in writing workshop, after all, is not exposing our kids to tons and tons of great writers (luckily, that is where reading workshop comes in!), but sharing texts that can inspire them to try a new strategy or embellish upon one they have mastered. A few well chosen examples of rich writing will go a long way.
Use texts your students are familiar with:
This was a lesson I learned the hard way my very first year of teaching. Then, as now, we launched all our genre studies by immersing ourselves in exemplars of the genre. I don't know what possessed me to add many different texts to my conferring mix, but I did. What I found was that I wasted a lot of time explaining the context of the story or piece of information at the expense of demonstrating how a writing move was used. When students have already read or heard the story, it seems to be easier to zoom in on the craft and stick to the writing point.
The same text can serve many writing purposes:
This is another lesson learned the hard way. The same "tool kit" text can be used to teach many different writing moves, depending on the student and his need. Here's one by the peerless Seymour Simon, from The Brain: All About Our Nervous System And More!

I've used this text to teach everything from broad concepts (effective, engaging leads which pull the reader right in) to narrower techniques (listing, beginning a series of sentences with strong verbs). Great writers give us this gift, they give us what we need to be efficient and effective writing teachers. We don't need to have tool kit folders crammed with zillions of mentor texts we need to sift through and hunt from each time we need to "show" a student what some craft move looks like.
Student mentor texts are essential:
I owe this one to Dan, now at the Rochester Institute of Technology doing something great in genetic science which I will never understand. Many years ago, I shared a mentor text from Cynthia Rylant in a conference with Dan, a reluctant and yet very able writer who believed that writing was just something to "get it over with". Many of us will recognize Dan as one of those "I'm done, I have nothing else to say" students. I shared an excerpt from Cynthia Rylant, thinking that that would do the trick to move Dan along in a particular writing piece. Instead, Dan listened, sat back and said, "Yeah, well that's Cynthia Rylant, she's been like writing forever and all, but I'm just a kid and I think this is all a kid can do."

I didn't have much to say then (it was, in my defense, my second year of teaching) but I would today...because I have student writing in my tool kit. There is something very powerful in a student seeing what someone in your sixth grade class last year or in the years before was able to craft. I try not to use current student work in conferences because I feel it sets up unnecessary competition, although current writing is in display all around our classroom.
Demonstrate with mentor texts:
I make photocopies of mentor texts to underline, draw loops and arrows, and make notes as I confer and teach, rather than use prepared, laminated "here's the teaching point" examples. Doing this allows me to be in the moment with the student, responding directly to writing in front of me. We talk through the teaching point, so that my thinking is visible and clear, and done in the presence of the student I am conferring with. This type of demonstration, I believe, better allows for the next step in conferring - the transfer of the writing move from mentor text writer to student writer. Best of all, the student has this annotated copy to back to her desk for easy reference.
Foster independence: display mentor texts/make them accessible:
There is nothing more frustrating than finishing a conference with a student, and then having that very same student signal that they need to confer again two minutes later. Especially if you feel that the conference had gone well and that the student was on his or her way for the rest of writing workshop. Ugh!

I have found, however, that keeping a genre study bulletin board where students can find the marked up versions of our whole class mentor text investigations, mini lesson anchor charts, and student examples has been an effective way to get my students to look for ways in which they can help themselves ... other than only looking to me. Often, my kids will look to these first for ideas about moving along their writing, before asking for a conference with me. Which is, I think, a good thing.

How do you organize and utilize mentor texts? We look forward to hearing and learning from you next week. Let's chat on Monday, May 11th at 8:30 p.m. EDT, when the six of us host a Twitter Chat about conferring toolkits. Search and tag #TWTBlog to participate.

I teach Writing Workshop, Language Arts and Social Studies to sixth graders at a middle school in suburban New Jersey. This blog is my attempt to capture all the "stuff" that goes into my teaching life - the planning, the dreaming, the reading, the preparing, the hoping and (above all) the kids. Please note that the content of this blog is my own. It does not reflect the opinions of my employer. View all posts by Tara Smith

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I have streamlined my conferring toolkit over the years, partly in an effort to be more effective and productive during those time-challenged sessions when I have just a few minutes to convey an important teaching point, and partly in an effort to maintain my sanity.

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Just Gimme a List!!!

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Lists, Lists, Lists!

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Summer is the perfect time to embrace the great outdoors and take learning beyond the classroom. Let's embark on exciting educational adventures that inspire, educate, and create unforgettable memories!

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Corona Avenue Elementary is located in Bell, CA.