Creative expository introductions mentor text lesson *free resource!

Expository introductions. Gone are the days when "I'm going to tell you all about sharks" was an
acceptable introduction. I mean really, was it ever acceptable? And yet, here were are, in the 21st century, teaching kids not to do it.

But, even if they know they shouldn't do that, they don't always know what to do. This is where mentor texts become really important. 

To help your kids learn a different kind of expository introductions, turn to the authors who do it best.

One of my favorite mentor authors is Nicola Davies. She writes about the most interesting topics in such an engaging way: sharks, sea turtles, bats, and even poop. (Yep, poop.)

One of my favorite Davies mentor texts is Surprising Sharks. It's full of interesting information and a new perspective on sharks. But the best part might be the introduction.

It's a unique introduction. It asks the reader to imagine swimming in the ocean and think about what is the scariest thing about being there.

She asks a few questions to get the reader's brain ready to think about sharks, and then she introduces her topic.

To use this book as a mentor text, you'll want to follow these four steps. You may want this to be a differentiated lesson.

Writers who struggle to write more basic introductions may need more practice with those before they try out this fairly challenging one. Writers who have mastered the basics could try this out as a new challenge!

Here's a tip for using mentor texts to teach writing strategies:

Every time you read a new book, read it as a reader. When you go back and reread it, put on your "writer's hat" and read it as a writer. Notice the kinds of things the author did and think about why he/she did it that way.

This will give you opportunities to discuss writing strategies authentically and to help you apply them as you model your own writing.

Step 1: Notice It!

1. Read aloud Surprising Sharks by Nicola Davies for fun.

2. When you’re ready to introduce this type of introduction, reread the introduction and say, “I’m noticing that Nicola Davies did something interesting here with her introduction.”

3. Have a discussion with students about the technique she used in the introduction: she asked the reader to imagine something and then asked questions to help them do it.

Step 2: Name It & Explain It!

• Chart the introduction and title it “Imagine This…”
• Identify the parts of the introduction:

1. Tells the reader to imagine they’re in the setting your topic is in.
2. Ask questions to get the reader’s mind ready to think about the topic.
3. Introduce your topic.

Anchor charts are really important for giving kids an anchor experience in examining the strategy an author used and applying it to their own writing. Here's the chart I built for this introduction to help kids understand the parts and try it out collaboratively!

Step 3: Teacher Tries It!

1. Choose a topic to write an expository introduction about. 

2. Think aloud as you identify the setting you want to introduce to your reader. For example, if you’re writing about a science topic, you could say, “I’m going to describe the setting that will help my reader visualize the setting for volcanoes. Many are on on a tropical island.” 

3. Write a sentence that tells the reader to imagine they are in that setting.

4. Think aloud about the questions you can ask the reader to get them thinking about this topic. You could say, “To help the reader visualize this topic for themselves, I’m going to ask them questions that will get them thinking about how they would feel if they heard the word, “volcano” while they were on a tropical island.

5. Write a couple of questions that help your reader envision these details.

6. For the last sentence in your introduction, name your topic.

  

Step 4: Kids Try It!

To help your kids apply this strategy, it's going to be important to give them several opportunities to practice. It's sort of a tricky one! In this handy free download, I include a handout with lots of opportunities for kids to try this strategy out, as well as some possible answers to help you! You can get this free download by entering your email below!. This free download includes...

• A step-by-step guide to introducing this strategy to students
• A sample anchor chart
• A handout for students to try writing several introductions of this type, plus a possible answer key
• A handout for students to apply this introduction in their own writing
• Sample introductions written with this strategy for modeling purposes

And it gets even better. You can win a COPY OF THIS BOOK!
Just enter the giveaway below! As you head through the blog hop with the links I share at the bottom of this post, you can enter to win a copy of each book to grow your mentor text collection!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Looking for other great writing mentor text lessons and free resources? Check out the other posts in this link-up from The Reading Crew! You're sure to get TONS of ideas.

Inlinkz Link Party

Pin It

Writing Better Beginnings for Personal Narratives

Not too long ago, I had to write a script for our holiday program at school. 

"Me?" I asked. "You want ME to direct the Christmas play?"

Yes, they said. Because we don't want to anymore.

Hee-hee. That's how we get suckered, right?

Anyway, the point is that, before I wrote my play, I took a look at a few others. I asked the person who wrote last year's play if I could take a look at it and make sure I was on the right track. I thought about how the play had worked before, what went well, and how I could ensure that would happen again.

Basically, I looked to the experts.

That's what we want our kids to do when they write, too.  We want them to look to the experts to figure out what they did and how they did it, so they can use that inspiration in their own writing. It's called "Reading like a writer" and it's an important focus of our campus writing approach.

It starts with getting your mindset ready to read like a writer. We built this little anchor chart with kids - what do you think about when you're reading like a reader, and what do you think about when you're reading like a writer?

This requires a lot of modeling at first. Kids really need to think carefully about this mind shift! It's tricky to move from simply understanding and connecting to analyzing and thinking about, "What did the author do here? Why did they do it? How did they do it?"

We used this approach recently as we helped kids understand how authors begin their narratives. Starting with a few experts (Kevin Henkes, Jane Yolen, and Patricia Polacco), we analyzed the beginnings of their stories.

Using this chart, we looked for the kind of beginning (Character description, setting description, and dialogue), what kind of details the author included in the beginning (usually who, when, where, and sometimes what is happening), and we critically analyzed to figure out why the author used that type of beginning.

This is the most difficulty part - understanding why an author would choose to write in the way he or she did. What is the impact on the reader? What are they trying to help us feel or see?

In their notebooks, kids had a typed-up copy of the beginning so they could annotate it as well and color-code it for "who", "when", "where", and sometimes "what".

And then we tried it! We decided to try out a setting description and brainstormed the kinds of details we could use our five senses to discover on a soccer field. We spent some time generating the language so we could use it to collaboratively write our beginning.

And then we tried it out! Not my best work, honestly, (I mean, who likes to start with "one summer evening?!") but, as I always tell the kids, I can go back and revise when I've had some time to think of a more interesting idea. We start by getting it on paper, and we can - and should - always improve it. 

Then kids tried their own in their notebooks.

 What are your favorite mentor texts for narrative writing? Read more about our school's mentor text baskets here!

Want a step-by-step approach with everything you need to teach narrative beginnings (including lesson plans, printables, and writing prompts)? Check out my Narrative Writing Minilessons: Good Beginnings resource on TpT!

Pin It

Mentor texts for each grade level* Freebie!

What's the most important teaching tool we have? Aside from your brains, it's books! We can do without handouts, copy machines, scented markers (although who would want to?) and even - gasp - post-its. But books are a necessity for authentic instruction. We learn from the greats. One of the first questions we ask when planning every reading & writing lesson should be "Which books show this in action? Which books can we use to engage students in observing this skill or strategy?"

One of the biggest undertakings my school has ventured into is aligning our use of mentor texts for reading and writing experiences. To support teachers and grade levels as a whole in doing this, and to help our collaborative planning, I decided to put together a collection of books for each grade level.

I was so excited to embark on this idea! I searched high and low for mentor text lists, lists of authors with titles under their belt, and recommendations from other teacher-authors, bloggers, and colleagues. I scoured the internet, high and low.

Why was this so difficult? Because my district, and therefore my school, is dual language. We believe in supporting the child's home language (in our area this is primarily Spanish) by following a specific model of language acquisition. This means the majority of literacy instruction in K-2 is in Spanish in our bilingual rooms, and then we increase English language arts in third, until in fourth and fifth we are teaching in English all day (except for Social Studies).

In order to make sure all of our kids had equal opportunity, and our teachers had equal support, I had to find authors and titles that were available in English and Spanish, or with equitable substitutes. This is tough. The trend is currently to move back into 100% English instruction, so Spanish titles are often off-the-market. We had to buy many of them from Amazon because Barnes & Noble (and other booksellers) no longer carries them.

But I finally figured out the authors and titles to use for each grade. The books were delivered a little at a time from different vendors over the summer. When I arrived, I had a pile of boxes in my room. I sorted them into grade levels and added a sticker on the front of each book noting the genre and grade level. Then I put a sticker on the inside cover of each book to give teachers a place to make notes about reading and writing lessons.

I set up the bins in the library and sorted all of the books - one set for each teacher and a master set to keep in my planning room so we'd have one to use during PLC.

During inservice, I provided a little training to teachers about using mentor texts and then I had my Oprah moment! Each teacher received his/her basket, labeled and tidy, to take back with them.

During PLC, we pull out the mentor text basket for their grade level as we plan for reading lessons and writing lessons! 

In case you're undertaking a similar initiative, I pulled together everything that I used for our mentor text project. The stickers, basket labels, and all the titles & authors that I used are there! Grab it from Google Drive!

Happy Teaching!

Pin It

Growing Writers with Mentor Texts: Mud! *Freebie!

  This month, the Reading Crew is celebrating spring! It's a fun link-up featuring a variety of mentor texts related to spring and a great freebie to go with each one. Check out all the posts and collect the mystery words from every post! Then use them to enter the Rafflecopter to win an Amazon giftcard and buy your own copies of the books!   There are two link-ups: K-2, and 3-5. Each has its own Rafflecopter, set of words, and great ideas. Happy Reading!  

Mud is a beautifully written book, perfect for growing students' writing language! Mary Lyn Ray uses vivid figurative language to describe the transition in seasons, from winter to spring. The word choice and sentence variety are incredible, and it's appropriate for all levels in elementary. 

It's simple enough to be enjoyed by any kindergartener, and complex enough to be emulated by any fifth grader. 

To begin the lesson, before you read a single page, introduce the idea of reading like writers. Writers choose their words carefully; they have a purpose for everything they do. As you read Mud together, you'll want to notice all of the beautiful language that Mary Lyn Ray uses to help the reader feel and visualize the changing of the seasons, resulting in mud.

 This resource (freebie, yay!) will guide you through the four main steps you'll use to have students notice, name, explain, and try figurative language in their own writing. 

They'll notice the language with you, help you build an anchor chart recording the figurative language you noticed, and participate in a discussion about why the author chose to use that language. These steps will work with ANY mentor text!

 

The figurative language used in the book includes onomatopoeia, personification, simile, alliteration, and sensory details.

Lines such as, "A cold, sweet smell rises from the ground, like sap in the snow," are beautiful and students will notice something special is happening! 

Every line is interesting, which makes this a great book for discussing beautiful lines.

After you've noticed the figurative language, named it, explained it, and charted it, you'll use the included graphic organizer to brainstorm figurative language to use in your own writing and model writing a descriptive paragraph for your students. Then your students will write their own descriptive paragraphs using their own figurative language!

Building in opportunities for students to see the reading-writing
connection in action are an absolute must! This freebie includes a page to help students identify figurative language during their independent or home reading. Noticing is the first step to being a great writer and reader!

 

Grab the freebie on TPT!

This freebie follows the gradual release model. It's a great way to teach new strategies in reading and writing! Get a gradual release freebie and reading resources and tips in your inbox by entering your email address below!     Before you move on to the next post, my mystery word is Mud. [HERE] is the link to the form you can use to keep track of the mystery words at each stop. You'll need them for an entry on the Rafflecopter below.

Rafflecopter for Grade 3-5

March 18-March 25

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you for hopping by! Be sure to check out the rest of the great Growing Readers & Writers posts for freebies and fun!

 

An InLinkz Link-up

 

An InLinkz Link-up

  Pin It

4 Steps to Teaching Transitional Phrases with Pumpkin Jack

Don't you just love it when you read a student's narrative and they use awesome transitional words like "First," "Then," and "Finally?" They add a touch of class and voice to their writing, and really help you experience their unique perspective.  LOL! No, they don't. Students who use these tired transitional phrases tend to write in a simplistic manner. Authentic transition use can take a moderate piece of writing and turn it into a very strong one. 

This blog hop is pretty exciting. As you click through each post, collect the "mystery word." You can record them on this sheet. Then, enter the rafflecopter to win every book! You'll also collect a great freebie to use with a mentor text for teaching a reading or writing skill or strategy!

Teaching Authentic Transitions

To introduce authentic transitions using a text model (the best way to introduce writing strategies - notice them in a mentor text!), I chose Pumpkin Jack. It's seasonal, easy to follow, and includes a ton of different transitions for different purposes. They're each used in a natural manner that doesn't cause the story to halt every time a transition is used.  To use a mentor text as a model, this is the procedure I follow:

The Lesson
These four steps help students see the craft being used well by a mentor author. 
Step 1: Notice It! Read aloud a great mentor book that demonstrates the craft you want to try with students. Pumpkin Jack does a great job of using transitional phrases naturally. As you read, mark the phrases with post-its, thinking about how they convey the passing of time. 
Step 2: Name it! Name the strategy and introduce it explicitly. When you name it, make sure to discuss with students how the craft adds something purposeful to the author's writing.  In Pumpkin Jack, you can discuss the following points:

• Transitional phrases are used to show the passing of time.
• They all sound different.
• Some show a short time has passed; some show a long time has passed.
• They are written in different places in a sentence and in a paragraph.

This would also be a good time to chart the transitional phrases by purpose, like in the anchor chart below. 

Step 3: Teacher tries it! When you model, think aloud a step at a time about how to use the craft deliberately and purposefully in your writing. Why is that craft a good idea? What is using it going to convey to your reader? How will you use it effectively? You might also revise an older piece using that craft, rather than writing a new piece. 
Step 4: Students try it! Have students try to use the craft in their writing. It might be easier to have them revise a piece of writing in a piece they've already written to use the craft. For transitional phrases, have students read their pieces to find where time has passed. Add in a transitional phrase that moves the piece from one time to the next. Refer back to your anchor chart of the transitions from Pumpkin Jack.
For a fun activity to do to help you "Notice It, Name It, and Try It," check out my new freebie on TPT for Teaching Transitions with Pumpkin Jack! It includes lesson ideas and tools for teaching students to use transitional phrases appropriately in their narratives. There's even a story for you to model revising with transitional phrases!
Tools to try it out!

Grab it free on TPT!

Did you catch my mystery word?  If not, it is Jack. Now it's time to hop to the next stop. Remember to record all of the mystery words so you can enter the big giveaway! Download the recording form here, if you don't already have it!

Happy Teaching! 

The next stop is...

Selma Dawani: Teaching and Learning Resources

or go to the start of the hop to collect 

all the mystery words or enter the Rafflecopter!

Pin It

Inspiring Student Writing

How many times do you actually give free choice in writing only to hear, "I don't know what to write about!" One thing that challenges our students is getting started in writing; choosing something to write about that they are actually interested in, and writing form their own unique perspective. 

Tell me if this has happened to you: you model writing a piece about a time you went to the beach with your family. You use some creative details, like descriptions of the sun, sand, and breeze. You share an encounter with a jellyfish! And then you describe the calm peacefulness you felt sitting on the sand.

And then you read your kids' writing. And almost all of them went to the beach! They described the sun, sand, and breeze, and that time they ran into a jellyfish! And then they felt so calm and peaceful.

Sound familiar?

That's the way writing often starts. Our kids, when they are still struggling to find their writing voice, use voices that...well...sound a lot like ours. If our writing is the only model of writing students have, we're really limiting their exposure to different types of writing styles. We have to give them lots of opportunities to read and look at things and search their brains for the memories and thoughts that those experiences trigger.

Inspire with Books & Authors
Some of my favorite books for inspiring student writing are by Cynthia Rylant. It's no secret - she's incredible. She makes me feel like a terrible writer. That's what good writers do, right? Something about the intricate and warm details she includes helps kids reach into their brains for their own details and memories.

This is the response I modeled for the kids in my writer's notebook after we read Scarecrow:

I wanted to stretch my students' thinking by freewriting in response to Scarecrow. This helps them think of a variety of ideas for their own future writing, making their writer's notebooks a real resource for writing.

Another book I love love love for inspiring student writing is The Ghost-Eye Tree. It includes suspense and very strong feelings. Great for getting kids to think about times they were frightened or uneasy.

This book by Jerry Seinfeld always cracked me and my kids up, and it got some of my less excited writers to write about their memories in a funny way.

I love Bat Loves the night by Nicola Davies for those kids who enjoy writing about science. Literary nonfiction titles are a great bridge for those kids!

And this book is excellent for teaching kids to zoom in on a moment.

When our kids read enough books by the same author, they get to know that author. They understand that writers make decisions and have a style. They get to say things like, "I'm going to write this like Patricia Polacco did." That's the value of an author study.

I like to put our favorite books into a "Books We Love" basket in our writing area. Kids who need inspiration can go borrow one and get inspired!

Inspire with Pictures

One of the things my kids enjoyed is starting with a picture. One year, my campus had a school-wide picture every month that we all wrote about. It was so interesting to see what direction everyone took the pictures! These are some way I used pictures:

• Settings: show students pictures about various settings that they may be writing about. Pictures of a certain season or location can help students think about where they'd like their writing to take place.
• Characters: provide pictures of different kinds of characters. Have students describe them. Do they know someone similar? What would that person say, do, or think? 
• Tone: show a picture that expresses a certain tone or feeling. Have students write in their notebook what that picture makes them think of.  

This is a writer's notebook entry I modeled in response to a picture of a baker!

Inspire with Words

A terrific strategy to use to encourage students to grow their expressive vocabularies and to "read like a writer" is "Filling the Room with Beautiful Language." I honestly don't know where I learned this, but here's what you do to fill your room with golden lines.

1. Read a beautifully written picture book aloud, slowly.

2. Students listen for their favorite line; the line that was written in such a vivid way that they want to remember it.

3. They write the line down; I sometimes had them record it on a sentence strip and illustrate it. These later went on a bulletin board full of "beautiful lines," or "golden lines."

4. To share your favorite lines, popcorn it out. One student stands up and reads his/her line. Then he sits down and another student stands up and reads his/her line. Continue until everyone has shared their lines. It fills your room with beautiful language. After you start hunting for this kind of language in the books you read, students will be inspired to try to "write like that," and they will grow their own language in the most expressive ways!

Visit this page to read another fun way we inspired our students' creative writing with interesting words.

For some fun inspirational writing tools, check out the Writing Inspiration Station on TPT. It's full of descriptive sentence starters, personal narrative starters and prompts, and fun pictures to write about. 

These creative story starter dice have a separate story starter on each side. There are creative story starter dice for holidays and seasons!

Pin It

Organizing Writing Mentor Texts

If you read my recent post about my closet, you are probably surprised that I would title any future post with the word "Organizing". My closet is, of course, an embarrassment I have recently shared with the world, but in general, I'm pretty good at creating organized systems. One of these I just started this year is our writing mentor texts library.  

Not all of these books are writing mentor texts but about half of them are!  

  It's working for us, so I thought it might be the perfect idea to link up with Primary Powers' Organization Blog Hop!

As a Literacy Coach, I help teachers plan for writing. Sometimes, we are desperate for another kind of writing model text for a specific skill or strategy, and we are stumped! To help us plan effectively, I started ordering books based on specific traits. You can find one of the lists I used here at Empowering Writers.      After the books came in, I set to organizing them. I wrote a specific characteristic of writing on each index card and made piles of books.   

From there, I divided them up into baskets and put them on specifically designated shelves:  

 I labeled each basket with the writing skill or strategy that the books were great models of. Some of these are great beginnings, great endings, character development, sensory description with the five senses.

Of course, Patricia Polacco gets her own baskets, as do these other great mentor authors: among them, Tomie dePaola, Cynthia Rylant, Gail Gibbons, and more.

To help us use the books well for planning, I made little stickers that go on the inside cover of each book. The image and label on the sticker correlates with the basket label. I printed the labels on sticker paper.

I cut them into strips to stick inside the books.

Here's how it works. This basket is labeled "Generating Ideas for Writing." In it, I also include books about the idea of writing, like "Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street" and "What Do Writers Do?"

This book, Little Red Writing Hood, tells a story of a pencil character writing a story. It blends Little Red Writing Hood with writing tips. 

 On the inside cover, I include notes: just some ideas about how to use the book to teach writing strategy.

Throughout the book, the tips about writing are interwoven with the story. I used post-its to mark pages where there were writing tips, strategies, or potential for teaching. 

It's still a burgeoning system, and we're adding to our library a little at a time, but it's a start! Want a freebie to get started? Grab the basket and book labels for free!   

  Check out our other organization tips by hopping to the next post - Mrs. Richardson's Class, and learn all about organizing guided reading groups!   

  Or, if you'd rather, start at the beginning of the hop and check out all the great organization tips! Pin It