Mentor Texts in the Classroom: Learning to Write from Writers by Karen Drexler

I always learn from other teachers. When I hear about what they are doing in their classrooms, especially when it comes to mentor texts, I start writing down the books they use and how they use them. Today I’m excited because Karen Drexler introduced me to a new book that I’d never read before, The Sleeping Porch. I can’t wait to get my hands on this mentor text. 

I first heard about mentor texts when I read the book About the Authors: Writing Workshop with Our Youngest Writers by Katie Wood Ray. I read the book cover to cover. I wanted to do the same kind of the work that she was doing using picture books as the framework for Writing Workshop but I was a Reading Recovery teacher at the time, and didn’t have my own classroom. So I shared the book with my friend and colleague who taught first grade and got her as excited as I was about doing some real writing with our first graders. I then persuaded my principal to let me carve out some time to co-teach Writer’s Workshop with her in her first grade classroom and we gave it a go. It became the most favorite part of our day! The difference it made in the level of excitement and the quality of the writing was tremendous. I can’t imagine teaching writing without using mentor texts.

A mentor text used in writing workshop becomes a text that students have heard many times. We might revisit a text at different times for different purposes but as the students listen to me read, they are listening as writers and thinking about what craft or idea they can emulate in their own writing.

I begin the year with writing personal narratives and most of the pictures books I use for that unit are new to my students. The purpose for reading these books initially is to help them understand that writers get ideas from their own lives. I’ll read Thank You, Mr. Falker early in the unit and explain how that story was inspired by Patricia Polacco’s own struggle with learning to read. Later on, they will recognize the little girl in the story My Red-Headed Rotten Older Brother and come to understand how that story might have begun as a memory from Patricia’s life. I don’t tell them who the author is and I wait to see when the light goes on and they recognize the illustration as the same little girl from Thank You, Mr. Falker. It’s always a fun moment to wait for and I am never disappointed. My young writers realize they might have a story of sibling rivalry from their own lives.

I know that in my building, third grade is the first time my students will be asked to think of small moments as the seeds for their personal narrative writing. I need to provide them with as many examples as I can so they can begin to envision the small moments in their own lives. It’s a difficult concept for them because they want to tell about event, after event, after event. I’ll read Fireflies by Janet Brinckloe, The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant and All the Places To Love by Patricia MacLachlan. The students use these examples as springboards to their own ideas about moments in their own lives. They bring their Writer’s Notebooks with them to the carpet and as I close the book they start a list of ideas that come to them.

I try to use picture books that touch me, books I love to read aloud over and over and that I know I can go back to for examples of writing craft when the time comes. This year, my group was having difficulty finding that “just right” seed moment so I went hunting for more titles to help them generate ideas based on family memories. I found a little gem called The Sleeping Porch by Karen Ackerman. It’s about a family that moves from a small apartment to a fixer-upper and find they have to sleep on the porch to avoid a leaky roof during a rainstorm. It is written in the first person and accompanied with soft, gentle illustrations. I think it helped my writers to recognize the value in their own family stories and as I looked away from the book, I could see the sparkle of ideas happening right there in front of me.   That’s when I know it’s time for me to be quiet and let them go write.

Karen Drexler is a teacher in the Trinity Area School District, Washington, PA