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Using Stories as the Landscape of Writing- A Case Study of Mentor (1)

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All things Kelly Gallagher, including my books, my schedule, teacher resources and what's going on in my life as a teacher.

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Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article

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I was in a school and one teacher said, "We're doing mentor texts," and it becomes like this thing that we do, then there's a list of books. Can you give us this -," and it becomes this little, it's a KWL. You know what I mean?

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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 t...

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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.

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Write Now, Summer 2016 | A Newsletter of the National Writing Project

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The leaders from Red Clay Writing Project and Deep Center-recipient of the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award-joined us for a conversation about their ongoing relationship and how we all might work together in order to create the richest learning ecosystems for all young people by joining forces inside and outside of schools, across organizations and learning institutions.

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A cynical friend of mine calls this the Book Club pedagogy, akin to treating literature as a string of Facebook statuses about our feelings. But think about the first work of literature that blew your mind. Whether it was Salinger or Ellison or Austen, or a Munro story you came across in a waiting-room copy of The New Yorker, there was most likely a moment, a snippet of dialogue or flight of lyricism that exploded in your squirrelly little heart. Perhaps you put an exclamation point in the margin and yellowed the sentence with a highlighter. You felt real energy there - a stirring in your soul, and you wanted more. Excited to find a kindred consciousness, you wanted to understand how a writer could make you feel that intensity with nothing more than words on a page.

In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements - diction, syntax, point of view and so forth - made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with "green lines," to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy.

Obviously, this is great fun for a pack of aspiring novelists, but why does such a motley assortment of computer science majors and chemistry students flock to these classes? For one thing, there is, at first, no reason to understand the historical significance or theoretical implications of a given work. It begins with a reader in the room with a story. Reading like a writer, as we do in workshops, provides a ground floor for any student. The question "What was your favorite moment in a story?" is an easy entry point for both a student schooled in the finest prep academy and a science major straight out of a substandard district. Anyone can find a favorite line. Placing further pressure on those lines - Why did you like it? What changed at that moment that brought energy to the text? - can help students trust their instincts: they were on to something! It's a less intimidating approach to literature, free from the burden of historical background and devoid of grad-school jargon.

Back when I was teaching first-year composition at a large state school, I'd often lament with my colleagues that so many of our incoming students hated to read (we were instructed not to use texts more than a few pages long). We bemoaned the fact that many had left high school without even knowing how to write a sentence.

But how can you teach someone to master language or read literature until he's fallen in love with it? Maybe in place of first-year composition we should be teaching first-year fiction. In a creative writing workshop, students begin to think about literature as stories to love, the way many of them did as children. Instead of deconstructing a text (that terrible word, text), they begin to understand the well-crafted sentence and the way it energizes and adds power to a larger story. After reading masterworks and feeling the effects a writer can have on their own souls, they want to get out their laptops and try doing the same thing.

What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book - to see what it's like to take a work apart and put it back together - using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it's an incredibly powerful learning experience.

Love, after all, isn't a passive process. Just as a chemistry student doesn't want to lean back and watch an experiment in class, my students don't like to be told to sit around and admire something simply because it is theoretically or historically significant. They want to formulate their own theorem, to write their own code.

By teaching the pleasures of writing our own stories, we remind them of the pleasures of reading and of the power of literature, something they may have experienced with Harry Potter but lost when they wrote a five-paragraph essay about Hawthorne. For one semester, at least, we do the work because we grow to love the work. After that? Well, with love, all things are possible.

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A cynical friend of mine calls this the Book Club pedagogy, akin to treating literature as a string of Facebook statuses about our feelings. But think about the first work of literature that blew your mind.

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If you want to write, you have to read

Writers, like everyone else, read i n order to learn and for their personal enjoyment, but beyond that, writers also practice a different kind of reading. "Reading like a writer" entails reading with the intention of learning more about writing from the texts and authors we are reading.

Reading what other writers have written and attending to how they have written expands the possibilities we can envision for our own writing. The texts from which we learn may be as short as one sentence, a paragraph, a poem or essay, or a longer collection of poems, or an entire book. These texts become mentor texts for us as we allow the authors to show us how to write.

When we read like writers we begin to look beneath the surface of the texts to notice the moves that the writers have made and we can try out those moves in our own writing. We can identify a particular structure or style and we can try it on. We can name a specific strategy or literary device and employ it to make our own meaning

What do you want to write? That's want you will want to read.

I write poetry. Therefore, I don't go a day without reading poetry. Several different "poem of the day" blogs arrive in my inbox daily. I buy books of poetry and I subscribe to several general writing journals, as well as three poetry journals. I read what I want to write.

We have all been in the situation where we have to write something and we don't know where to start. For example, if I want to write a letter to the editor in our local newspaper, I may need to spend a day or two studying the letters that have been accepted for publication out of the many submitted. What are some characteristics that make them effective? Which of these will I use in my own letter?

In 2011, the Columbus Area Writing Project held its first fall writing conference. I needed to create a program booklet for this event. Even though I had been to lots of conferences and used lots of program booklets, I still wasn't sure where to start to create one. I turned to the many program booklets I have saved from other conferences that were similar in size and purpose to the one we were planning. Those programs taught me how to create my own-they became my mentor texts.

When I began this blog, I read lots of blogs, not just to enjoy and learn, as I had been doing, but with the intention of being shown how to write my own blog. I paid attention to everything from layout to content, from font to use of images, from length of post to frequency and so on.

Sometimes we may adopt an entire written structure as our own framework on which to hang our words and meaning. Click to reread my poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at Leaving School. I studied each section of Stevens's poem and duplicated his framework. His poem was my mentor text. When we so closely borrow another writer's structure or ideas it is customary to acknowledge (thank, apologize) that we have done so, usually following the title.

We can also borrow a larger, big picture as a framework. My friend and fellow blogger, Gretchen Schroeder, after reading Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, is currently writing her humorous memoir entries on her blog, in a similar, alphabetical, encyclopedia style.

What we read can teach us much about what we are striving to write.

If we want to write, we must read.

What books, poems or other texts have taught you how to write?

What are you trying to write now?
What texts will help you accomplish this?

Can you use one of the following poems as a framework to create your own poem?

What did you learn as you borrowed these writing structures?

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Mentor Texts: Learning to Write from What We Read

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If you want to write, you have to read Writers, like everyone else, read i n order to learn and for their personal enjoyment, but beyond that, writers also practice a different kind of reading. "Reading like a writer" entails reading with the intention of learning more about writing from the texts and authors we are reading.

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Welcome to Mentor Texts with Lynne and Rose, a resource for educators to learn more about how to help their students become better writers with the use of beloved mentor texts. How do children's...

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I would really like to create Public Service Announcements with my 4th and 5th grade students during the up-coming school year. Other than showing students some sample public service announcements from the 90s, how else did you scaffold the project for student success? Did students storyboard a script before filming?

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Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities

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Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities

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The National Writing Project produces a radio program that focuses on a variety of aspects of writing instruction. This episode discusses the many ways mentor texts support writers. Direct connections to learning across the disciplines and resources for finding mentor texts are also explored.

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Summary: In this episode we discuss with our guests the many ways mentor texts support writers and inspire writing of all genres in the classroom and beyond. We also explore direct connections to learning across the disciplines and resources for identifying and finding mentor texts.

Excerpt from Show

Lynne Dorfman-co-director of the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project and co-author of Mentor Texts , Non-fiction Mentor Texts , and Poetry Mentor Texts -defines mentor texts:

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 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."

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Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities

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Summary: In this episode we discuss with our guests the many ways mentor texts support writers and inspire writing of all genres in the classroom and beyond. We also explore direct connections to learning across the disciplines and resources for identifying and finding mentor texts.

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Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities

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Reading, Writing, and Mentor Texts: Imagining Possibilities

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Summary: In this episode we discuss with our guests the many ways mentor texts support writers and inspire writing of all genres in the classroom and beyond. We also explore direct connections to learning across the disciplines and resources for identifying and finding mentor texts.

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Always Write: "Mentor Texts" are a Powerful Tool When Designing Writing Lessons

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Besides being a well-liked 6th-8th grade teacher (though I've taught writing to 3rd-12th grades), I too am a presenter of professional development. I don't like traveling away from my wife and my dogs more than five or six times in a year, so even though I have presented over a dozen times at the national conferences, I have chosen not to do much of that over the past five or six years.

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Mentor Text Lessons: Published Poetry
forty-seven lessons created by teachers who've attend our NNWP workshops

When students write poetry alongside their teachers, both teacher and student learn more about how the writing process is different for every individual child. Our Piñon Poetry Festival celebrates this simple but true notion.

How did this page of lessons come about? Since the 1990's our Northern Nevada Writing Project has sponsored annual poetry events for students and teachers in Nevada. In 2001, when we launched the WritingFix website, we began posting many of the demonstration lessons from past workshops, and we began posting new lessons that were being created by our NNWP Teacher Consultants and teachers taking our inservice classes. This page began taking shape as our "poetry collection" in 2002.

Great advice from a favorite author in Northern Nevada !

Teachers attend our popular Piñon Poetry Festival with two of their students in tow, and together they write poetry inspired from demonstration lessons presented by NNWP Teacher Consultants. Teachers return to their classrooms with lessons, mentor texts, published samples, and student helpers who can assist them when they teach the lessons to the rest of their students.

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Bill suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for most of the years he worked with us. He joked and laughed about the annoyances of the debilitating disease and negotiated the difficulties of his disability with uncommon courage and grace. He inspired us to do our best and to see the finest in one another. We found it most fitting when noted poet, Sean Griffin, announced in 1998 that the Our Piñon Poetry Festival is Dedicated to Bill Abrams' Memory the following information about Bill was shared by Joan Taylor, former Director of the Northern Nevada Writing Project

Bill Abrams was a leader of teachers and a poet for over 20 years. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, he was committed to the students and teachers in Nevada. Bill had tremendous faith in the power of teachers working collaboratively with one another and spent much time on projects to draw teachers together to share ideas and celebrate their own and their students' learning. Although he was an ardent fan of all teachers, he had a special love for English/language arts teachers; and he had an amazing knack for getting them involved in far-flung and engaging projects. Many of us are still working on those projects today, almost 15 years after he left us.

He was a poet and long-time member of Ash Canyon Poetry Society. He would often entertain us with his poems during Northern Nevada Writing Project Summer Institutes. He founded the Northern Nevada Piñon Poetry Festival when it became apparent that the Book-Out and the Nevada Young Writers publications were so overflowing with poetry that we perhaps needed an additional event and publication just for the poetry selections.
Northern Nevada Piñon Poetry Festival would be renamed the Bill Abrams Piñon Poetry Festival.
Click here to open and read one of Bill's poems.

Dennis Black, friend of the NNWP, painted our
Festival Mural.

Each spring, 30 teachers register for the NNWP's Piñon Poetry Festival in Northern Nevada. These teachers attend the festival with two of their students, and all three write poetry together to one or two of the poetry lessons featured at WritingFix. When teachers return to school, they are encouraged to teach the poetry lessons from the festival with their whole class, using the two students who accompanied them as helpers.

The Piñon Poetry Festival has been an annual event in Northern Nevada since the 1990's. In 2006, as our WritingFix resource website was gaining popularity with a national and international audience, we decided to begin posting the festival's demonstration lessons on this page for anyone to access and use with their student writers. Below, you can find all our featured poetry lessons we've posted since 2006. If our festival's poetry lessons don't provide poetic inspiration to you, be sure to look lower on the page where we share a variety of lessons by Northern Nevada teachers that--even though never shared at our feastival--are great lessons for students of all ages, K-12.
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Coming to our 2011 Festival:
Quest-item Poetry

Mentor Text: "I've Gotta Name"
sung by Jim Croce

From our 2010 Festival:The Color of Love

Mentor Text:
I Love You the Purplest
by Barbara M. Joosse

From our 2010 Festival:
Emotions & Colorful Days

Mentor Text:
My Many Colored Days
by Dr. Seuss

From our 2009 Festival:What If... Poems

Mentor Text:
What If...
by Regina J. Williams

From our 2009 Festival:
Haiku Riddles

Mentor Text:
If Not for the Cat
by Jack Prelutsky

From our 2008 Festival: Poems of Apology

Mentor Texts:
This is Just to Say...
by Joyce Sidman

From our 2007 Festival: Between Repeated Lines

Mentor Text:
Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers
by Mary Ann Hoberman

From our 2006 Festival:
School Song Parodies

Mentor Text:
Take Me Out of the Bathtub and other Silly Dilly Songs by Alan Katz

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Picture books can inspire great poetry from your students! Each year in Northern Nevada, we host a variety of teacher workshops that we call "Make and Take" workshops; at each class's conclusion, all participants have created a new lesson they're willing to share with the other participants as well as share with their students. Some of our participants' lessons really shine as powerful exemplars of well-designed instruction. The very best of those lessons--with the contributing teacher's permission--become part of the WritingFix collection.

Below, you will find poetry lessons created over the years by teachers who were inspired by picture books from their classroom bookshelves.

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Chapter books can inspire great poetry from your students! Each year in Northern Nevada, we host a variety of teacher workshops that we call "Make and Take" workshops; at each class's conclusion, all participants have created a new lesson they're willing to share with the other participants as well as share with their students. Some of our participants' lessons really shine as powerful exemplars of well-designed instruction. The very best of those lessons--with the contributing teacher's permission--become part of the WritingFix collection.

Below, you will find poetry lessons created over the years by teachers who were inspired by favorite chapter books and short stories from their classroom bookshelves.

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Song lyrics can inspire great poetry from your students! Each year in Northern Nevada, we host a variety of teacher workshops that we call "Make and Take" workshops; at each class's conclusion, all participants have created a new lesson they're willing to share with the other participants as well as share with their students. Some of our participants' lessons really shine as powerful exemplars of well-designed instruction. The very best of those lessons--with the contributing teacher's permission--become part of the WritingFix collection.

Below, you will find poetry lessons created over the years by teachers who were inspired by favorite song lyrics from their classroom iPods and music players.

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Classic poetry can inspire great poetry from your students! Each year in Northern Nevada, we host a variety of teacher workshops that we call "Make and Take" workshops; at each class's conclusion, all participants have created a new lesson they're willing to share with the other participants as well as share with their students. Some of our participants' lessons really shine as powerful exemplars of well-designed instruction. The very best of those lessons--with the contributing teacher's permission--become part of the WritingFix collection.

Below, you will find poetry lessons created over the years by teachers who were inspired by favorite classic poems from their classroom anthologies.

© Copyright 2015 - WritingFix- All Rights Reserved.
Please, share the resources you find on these pages freely with fellow educators, but please leave any page citations on handouts intact, and please give authorship credit to the cited teachers who created these wonderful lessons and resources. Thanks in advance for honoring other educators' intellectual property.

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WritingFix Projects: Poetry Lessons & Prompts

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Mentor Text Lessons: Published Poetry forty-seven lessons created by teachers who've attend our NNWP workshops When students write poetry alongside their teachers, both teacher and student learn more about how the writing process is different for every individual child. Our Piñon Poetry Festival celebrates this simple but true notion.

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The seminal report Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) is based on a meta-analysis of research related to best instructional practices for improving student writing. One of the eleven elements identified in the report as most effective is Study of Models (i.e., provide students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing). Showing models is also one of the six instructional practices that make up the teaching routine for Keys to Content Writing (Keys to Literacy's writing professional development program). But many teachers are not sure about where to find good mentor writing samples, or what would be a good focus for analyzing a mentor text.

That's why I was so pleased to learn of a website, WritingFix.com, that provides a large number of free mentor text lessons developed by teachers. The WritingFix website was started in 1999 by Corbett Harrison, a writing teacher, as a way for writing instruction ideas to be shared by educators. From 2002-2007 while Corbett served as director, the Northern Nevada Writing Project raised funds to grow the website, which now houses hundreds of writing lessons.

The mentor text lessons, of which many include passages from the texts, are organized into the following categories. I have included links to the web pages for each category:

There is also a category for analyzing and emulating songs and lyrics.

Each lesson identifies the specific writing skill focus for which the mentor text has been chosen. For example: word choice, conventions, voice, organization, sentence fluency.

To give you a sense of what's provided in a lesson, I have included the text samples from a lesson about how to describe a natural object or place. After reading and comparing the four mentor samples, students emulate this technique by writing descriptive paragraphs of their own.

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Mentor Text Lessons to Improve Student Writing - Keys to Literacy

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The seminal report Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) is based on a meta-analysis of research related to best instructional practices for improving student writing. One of the eleven elements identified in the report as most effective is Study of Models (i.e., provide students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing).

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In my classroom, the school year typically comes on like gangbusters. I begin fast and furious as a sort of illusion - more for my benefit than for the students. It's as though I feel that the faster I tread the beginning-of-school water, the less I'll feel like I'm drowning.

This year has been very different.

My maternity leave it looming large, and in an effort to stick with the plan I made with my substitute in the spring, I am slowing way down. The result is that we are spending our days doing all of the activities I have always wanted to do to build community .

A couple of weeks ago, Stacey at Two Writing Teachers posted a great idea for using a book of author-inspired art to help students introduce themselves to the class. I decided to take the leap and try it with the added bonus of using it as a means to introduce students to mentor texts.

On Tuesday, the first day of class, I shared the three illustrations that Stacey shared in her original post. I told students that these, while visual, were still texts that we could study. In fact, they are mentor texts - any text that inspires writing or teaches us something about writing.

I asked them to study these examples and, together, to make a list of "rules" for creating author introduction art:

I wanted students to go through these steps in order to learn how we use mentor texts. What I was surprised to learn was how much my ninth graders really needed these rules in order to create their own author introduction art. To shift their dependence from teacher to mentor, I redirected all of their questions back to the mentor text.

"Should I use color?" Look at the mentor text.

"How many images do I need?" What does the mentor text tell you?

Students shared their introductions in the form of a gallery walk. As the students roamed and read, I asked them to jot down any questions they had for one another (either clarification or follow-up questions) and to make note of commonalities they noticed among class members.

When we had all had a chance to silently "meet" one another, we had a group discussion - asking follow-up questions, playing impromptu games of, "Does anyone here have a ____?", "Has anyone here been to_____?" By the time class was over, my previously nervous freshmen were smiling and talking to one another.

Only time will tell if this activity had a deep impact on my students' understanding of mentor texts, but it certainly them some important, early exposure to mentor texts. It set the tone that individual study and inquiry - independence - is going to get them further than asking the teacher. And it helped my students feel more comfortable in my classroom.

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Every August teachers everywhere lose sleep over the first days of school. Some of us dream of showing up without lesson plans, copiers that break down leaving us syllabus-less. Some dream of classrooms without enough desks, of desks without chairs.

The thing that keeps me up at night is the impression I'm going to leave with students in the first few days. I rack my brain every year for an activity that will accomplish the following:

set the tone for the year

inspire students

get students writing and reading right away

show rather than tell about the routines of the class

help students learn one another's names and get to know one another on a meaningful level

As usual this August I spent several sleepless nights trying to invent an activity that might fulfill this criteria. And I kept coming back to this book that I couldn't keep on my shelves last year: Robin Bowman's It's Complicated: The American Teenager.
photo taken from amazon.com
Students love this book for its candid interviews and stunning portraits of teenagers. The more I thought about this book the more I began to see it as more than a book. I began to envision it as a mentor text that could not only inspire my students but teach them something about writing and about one another. The result of my insomnia was The American Teenager Project.
Getting Ready:

I read through the book, tagging interviews of 13 and 14-year-olds (I am teaching 8th and 9th grade this year).

Then I reread these entries looking for compelling profiles that would represent a variety of perspectives, worldviews, and lifestyles. I narrowed it down to six.

I photocopied the entries and made packets for each student.

I typed up the list of the 26 interview questions Bowman asked her subjects, removing only three which I felt weren't appropriate for younger students or relevant to the year 2014 (Bowman conducted her interviews in the early 2000s.)

I thought about questions I might ask to help them probe these mentor texts like writers (see below).

I checked out a set of iPads from the library so students could record their interviews in class.

Getting Started: Day #1

1. On the first day of school, I welcomed students to my classroom, took attendance, and did a 60 second overview of the syllabus. I asked students to read and annotate the syllabus for homework, returning the next day with questions.

2. Then we put the syllabi away, and I said, "I want to tell you about a book my students have loved." I showed them Bowman's book, spreading open the pages of the book and walking around the room as I gave a summary, some information about Bowman, and a clincher. "If you've ever wondered what other teens just like you really think about this life, this is the book for you." Then I read one interview with the book under the document camera. This was a perfect way to begin book talks and a great prelude into our own American Teenager Project.

3. Next I passed out the packets and gave a brief introduction to mentor texts. I said, "Here are six pages from the book. These are mentor texts. Mentor texts are anything that inspire and teach us about writing." Then we began reading the interviews out loud with these guiding questions:

What do you notice about these teens? Are there any common themes?

What surprises you about the interviews?

What do you connect with? Where do you see yourself in these teenagers?

I gave small groups a chance to discuss these questions, and then we shared our reactions as a whole group. Many of them commented on the fact that much of the stress and anxiety felt by teens stems from their parents.

For homework I asked students to read through the interviews again, this time with a different focus. I asked them to mark-up the text and jot down their answers to these questions:

How do you think the writer, Robin Bowman, chose what to put in?

How do you think Bowman chose what to leave out?

What makes the responses compelling?

What do you want to know more about?

Day #2
The next day we met as a group of writers, trading our insights about these interviews. After the students talked in small groups, and we made a large list on the overhead of our observations.

Then I passed out instructions for our own version of The American Teenager Project. That night for homework, students chose a minimum of six questions and took notes for each of the questions. These notes became talking points for their interviews the next day.

We spent the remainder of the class talking about the syllabus and answering questions they had about the class.
Day #3
On day three, students paired up with someone at their table. They were invited to find a spot on campus to conduct their interviews. I asked them to record between 3-5 minutes of footage. I thought 3-5 minutes would give them enough fodder without making the transcription process unbearable. They were also instructed to take a picture of their subject. Before the students set out to do their interviewing, I did a minilesson on the qualities of a good interviewer and the qualities of a good interviewee. They copied these notes into their notebooks. For homework that night, they transcribed the audio.

(Students loved the interview process. Many of them had fun experimenting with filters-something I hadn't even thought of-to help them "shape" their portraits.)
Day #4
On day four, students brought their transcribed interviews to class. I conducted a mini lesson that helped students think about how they might shape the interview and thus the story of their subject. We talked about what kinds of responses they might keep verses which responses they might leave out. I reminded them that Bowman likely had an hour or more of footage for each subject because she asked all 26 questions of every person. We looked at the interviews again and estimated that the final interviews were likely 1-2 minutes in length.

Several students brought up the idea of wanting to emphasize a certain understanding, story, or theme about their partner, which would entail cutting out anything that didn't connect to that theme. Other students said it was important to represent the complexity of their partner by showing lots of different responses. Students used highlighters to trace emerging themes in their partner's interview. They continued this work for homework.
Day #5
I conducted a short mini-lesson on how to format the interview. I asked students to study Bowman's profiles and think about these questions:

Do you notice any interesting punctuation? How is this punctuation being used?

How does Bowman indicate the end of one response and the beginning of a new one?

How long is each profile?

Do you notice any titles or ancillary information? Any other font features?

These questions lead to conversations about the following writerly things:

what an ellipses is and why writers use them

what an em-dash is and why writers use them

rules about indenting paragraphs

how images enhance text

what wrapped text does and how to wrap text in a Google Doc or Word Doc

I also took this opportunity to show them how to sign in to Gmail (students already have school accounts), access Drive, and create a new Document. Students used workshop time to format their interviews or continue shaping them. Some of them explored Robin Bowman's website for more inspiration.
Day #6
On Day #6, students brought printed copies of their final "collaborative portraits" (the term Bowman uses to define this genre of writing) and we had a Read Around. Students put everything away and set their writing in the center of their desks. Portraits were rotated clockwise, and each group had about 5 minutes to cycle through four. Then students got up and moved to the next table. In a class of 20, it took about 25-30 minutes for every student to read every portrait. I had asked students to keep in the mind the name of two individuals they would like to get to know better this year based on what they learned about them in their profiles.

For homework that night, students completed this survey to reflect on their first writing project. Here are a few responses that stood out to me:

[I learned that] I need to have better conversation starts and ends. - Brian

[I discovered that] I would like to write more interviews about people because I find it interesting. -Elizabeth

[Through this activity] I learned that I want to write more about actual people and less about fictional people and stories. -Cole

I did not know how interested I was in learning about someone else. -Summer

I prefer this assignment to [typical getting-to-know-you activities] because we get to know people on a deeper level...I discovered that I would like to explore writing about the future. One of the questions was what you want to be when you grow up and it got me interested in the future. - Kennedy

What I learned about myself through this activity was that I can open myself up a little more and talk about things I usually wouldn't talk about. -Grayson

As I was answering the questions, I started to realize that the future and where my life is going to go is something that really interests me. -Aubrey Scott

I learned that I am unique and most of my peers never had the experience that I have had. - Annalynn

I discovered that I would love to explore [through writing this year] the Depression because Reed's interview about the homeless made me think about the Depression. -Garett

[I learned that] I would maybe like to explore writing more about other [people's] views of the world. -Reed

I would like to learn more about inequality in different teens throughout the world and family relationships because it seems like a ton more people than we realize face problems within their families. -Ravenel

I learned to be more honest with people and that it is okay to share your feelings with friends. -Liam

[I prefered this assignment to typal getting-to-know-you activities] because it explains your story better... -Michael

I discovered the topic of ethnicities and I would like to write about that because I don't even know mine. -Kara

While reflecting on the project myself, I realized it had a few surprising outcomes.

It helped me identify which students are going to need more technological support this year and which students I may be able to call on to help others with technology.

It helped complicate some of the assumptions I had made about students early on.

It helped me share the following language and routines of the workshop without having to explicitly talk about them:

mentor texts

time to write & conferring

the development of a "so what" or significance

how to create a document in Google Docs

what is genre study

what is a mini-lesson

In the end, the portraits were moving, rich, and candid. It's amazing what can happen when you give kids a camera and ask them to tell their story...

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Summer Mentor Text Countdown Week 6 - Mentor Texts for the First Week of School

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Are you ready to start planning for the first week of school? We use mentor texts in our classes from the very first day of school. We want to lay down a strong foundation and also some strong expectations that mentor texts will be our go-to source for inspiring our work, giving us how-tos, and...

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Authentic literature has the power to excite students and foster a love of engaged reading, but it's often challenging for busy teachers to find time to integrate real books into an already jam-packed schedule of daily lessons. H ow can you harness the power of a and get students reading more throughout the day-especially when you're dealing with students of different ages and abilities?

Prioritize balanced literacy in the new year ahead with these 10 ways to incorporate books and reading into many different aspects of elementary, middle AND high school classrooms. (Keep reading to the end to enter our giveaway of popular titles for readers of all ages. What a great way to grow your classroom library!)

When you think of a read aloud, what comes to mind? Often, it's a high quality picture book like by Eric Carle or by Brendan Wenzel. Titles like these allow teachers to model fluency and demonstrate reading practices and skills to pre- and early readers. Plus, it can be just plain fun to share a story like R. L. Stine's with a class of young students who can't yet read it for themselves.

But read alouds have a lot to offer middle and high school students too. They can be especially beneficial to English Language Learners (ELL) at all grade levels, helping them to learn vocabulary, inflection and more. And excerpts from both poetry and novels-where complex language and themes sometimes make comprehension more challenging-lend themselves to read alouds in even upper level courses.

2. Guided Reading Groups

To fully understand the practice of guided reading and how to match your guided reading groups with titles at the right level , check out the work of . Guided reading groups can be used at any grade level, and allow for close teacher observations and assessments. More importantly, they can foster confidence, proficiency and a love of reading among students.

During Reading Workshop, teachers use real books to model and illustrate comprehension strategies and skills to the whole class. If you have a solid collection of authentic literature, it's easy to connect the texts to six strategies: Connecting, Inferring, Predicting, Questioning, Summarizing and Visualizing/Imaging.

Let's say you want to work on by Paul Fleishman and Predicting with your 2 nd grade class. When you have a Comprehension Strategies Collection that includes titles like The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton, you have stories already on hand to help teach students how to use clues from the text to think ahead and predict what might happen next.

setting aside structured silent reading time each day

asking students to read at home each night

building classroom libraries filled with fiction and nonfiction titles in a wide variety of genres and interests

Authentic literature is ideal for independent reading at any level because students get to choose any book that interests them. And when students have a voice in their own reading process, they read more-becoming better, more engaged readers in the process.

5. Mentor Texts for Writing Workshop

When teachers use authentic literature to teach about different writing formats, these books are called mentor texts . (The books you use in Reading Workshop to model comprehension strategies are mentor texts too.)

Want to work on memoir writing during a with your 6 th grade class? You might start with a mini lesson featuring Lois Lowry's memoir . Show students which traits and characteristics make this a good example of a memoir, and then have them work independently on their own piece of memoir writing. Conference with students along the way, and allow for share time once the writing is completed.

6. Literature Circles and Book Clubs

7. Author and Genre Studies

When students read authentic literature, there's so much more to explore than just the words and pictures within the pages. Both author and genre studies allow you to group several titles together, giving students the opportunity to make connections between the texts and compare and contrast characters, themes, settings and more.

Fourth grade teacher Jennifer Pastore believes that the best author studies allow students to become better readers and writers by learning from an author's body of work. Author studies let students see how authors get their ideas and see a variety of writing styles, which in turn helps them as writers.

Genre studies, on the other hand, introduce students to a variety of books they might not otherwise choose. You can open your students' minds and expand their reading choices with genre studies in categories like , , , Native American Legends and more.

8. Reading Intervention

All students need books they can read and enjoy. Young gifted readers need books at a high reading level, but with content appropriate for younger kids. Older students who struggle need lower level books that feature more mature themes-and don't appear to be below-level. For example, it's easy to pull in reluctant readers who love sports with Sports Illustrated Kids , a collection of graphic novels featuring full-color, full-action and full-throttle sports stories.

It makes sense to use authentic literature to teach reading skills and comprehension strategies, but don't forget that nonfiction books can be used in place of-or in addition to-textbooks to teach content areas like science, social studies and even math.

In an upper elementary or middle school classroom, for example, a nonfiction book like allows students to understand the Civil Rights Movement by exploring one of its real-life legends. Books like this one are often less intimidating than textbooks, and can help students make more meaningful connections, since the facts are woven within a fascinating story. And because this book is written in verse, teachers have an opportunity to teach history and poetry at the same time.

Students today are inundated with information from the digital world, but online information isn't always accurate. Because of this, it's important for students to work on their inquiry skills. They must be able to validate texts and compare and contrast different information through different modalities and by different authors.

When older students read a book like , there are many different ways they can build background knowledge and better understand the truth about the Taliban through projects beyond the text. Implement standards 7-9 by asking students to further research Malala's true story and analyze web content like The Daily Show Video: Malala Yousafzai Extended Interview . Keep in mind that projects like this one aren't limited to high school students. With books at the right level, elementary and middle school readers can develop their inquiry skills in the same manner.

There's always room to grow and expand your classroom library collection of books to engage students as readers, so we're hosting a giveaway featuring some of our favorite titles for elementary, middle AND high school readers. Enter below for your chance to win!

This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winners!

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10 Ways to Use Authentic Literature in Elementary, Middle AND High School Classrooms

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Authentic literature has the power to excite students and foster a love of engaged reading, but it's often challenging for busy teachers to find time to integrate real books into an already jam-packed schedule of daily lessons. How can you harness the power of a

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This blog is both a forum for collaboration and a resource for language arts teachers to use. Please use the sentences you find here as models for exploration and imitation in your classrooms, and add to them as you find strong examples through your personal and class readings. Use the sidebar to the left to view or add to the collected sentences.

The idea for the blog grew from a conversation at one of Jeff Anderson's workshops. Jeff is the author of Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer's Workshop , a very practical and valuable exploration of grammar and writing instruction. Through discussion of how to promote positive development of students' grammar knowledge and writing style, Jeff encouraged us as teachers to find powerful model sentences in the stories and books we read, and to present these sentences to our students as models for discussion (what he calls "noticing") and imitation. When teachers asked if there is a collection of these model sentences somewhere, the idea for this blog was born. Jeff's second book, Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop , also holds many lessons to help you teach editing outside of the "vacuum" of canned instruction.

Use in the Classroom: These are meant to be noteworthy sentences from published authors that students can examine ("What things do you notice about this sentence?") and imitate ("Now you try it, using this sentence as an example.") within the context of writing instruction of all types. Some sentences could also serve as leads, prompts, or stems for journal entries or more formal writing assignments.

Organization of Blog: In the left sidebar, I have grouped these entries in a variety of ways, knowing that teachers look for sentences for many reasons. There is a general "Best Sentences Ever" Section, and below that there are numerous more specific categories of the following titles: Parts of Sentences (with subheadings of Parts of Speech, Phrases, and Clauses), Purpose of Sentences, Structure of Sentences, Length of Sentences, Syntax Techniques, Figurative Language, Sound Devices, Literary Techniques, Punctuation, and Style/Voice.

How to use this site as a resource: Use the links in the left sidebar to select a category of sentences. Once on the category page, click on individual types of sentences to view or add sentences. Read the "Comments" to find sentences relevant to your current search.

How to contribute to this resource: Below any post about a type of sentence, click on the "Comments" link, and type the sentences according to the following directions. Please write out your selected sentence(s) in quotations, followed by the name of the author, the work in which these lines appear, and the page number(s) on which these lines appear. Please proofread before posting. NOTES: Colorful quotations are wonderful, but please try to make sure they are also appropriate. If you have a strategy that has worked well with this particular sentence you are posting, you may also include a brief description of that strategy.

Thanks for contributing! If you have a comment or suggestion, you may email me at lswolter@gmail.com.

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Notable Sentences...for Imitation and Creation

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"As writers, we learn most of what we know just by watching the pros, don't we?" ~John R. Trimble

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When George Lucas was making Star Wars, his special effects team was at a loss as to how to film realistic-looking dogfight scenes. They began by storyboarding them, but they found that simply drawing the scenes on paper didn’t help them understand the pacing and rhythm of the fights. They solved th

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Using Mentor Texts to Teach Writing in Middle School

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Six Suggestions for Using Mentor Texts in the Classroom