Mentor Texts

Throughout this blog, you will see this textbook referenced a lot.  In our Teaching the Language Arts class, we used this to plan lessons.  The book gives examples of "Your Turn" lessons that can be used, but can also be adapted (as we did in this class) for your students.  It gives you a step-by-step format to follow that will help students in their writing process.  The written text in this book helps explain the reasoning behind teaching this way, and helps the teacher better understand how to teach the lesson.  I highly recommend this book to all teachers.  While it is written for about 2nd-4th grade level classrooms, it can easily be adapted for older or younger students.

Dorfman, L. R., & Cappelli, R. (2007). Mentor texts: Teaching writing through children’s literature, K-6. Portland, Me.: Stenhouse.