Mentor Text Monday (#1 Literacy Mentor Texts) + freebie

 Thanks for stopping by for the first Mentor Text Monday! 

The mentor texts that I'm asking everyone to share today (or whenever you get a chance to link up to this post) are any book that you use to help you teach a literacy related topic. I'm doing a whole separate week for writing mentor texts at the end of this 4 week series. There are just so many great mentor texts for specific writing lessons, that I thought they deserved their own week. 

 I recently discovered two (new to me) books that are perfect mentor texts. The first one is Kitchen Dance by Maurie J. Manning. I used this story to introduce the concept of small moment stories and to help my little ones focus on the word choice within the text. I reread it when we started writing small moment stories.

 
 The second book is called Saturdays and Teacakes by Lester Laminack. This is a beautiful story about a boy who rides his bike to visit his grandma each week. My students LOVED the illustrations in this book! I used this book as an example of a personal narrative story and we focused on dialogue in the text.

As promised, I also wanted to share about how I organize the mentor texts that I use in my classroom.  Three years ago,  after switching grade levels and/or rooms for 6 years in a row, I decided that I needed a more organized way to store the books that fit in the "hey, this is a perfect book to teach..." category.  

My mentor text bins are not fancy, but they are organized in a way that saves me tons of time and keeps my favorite books to teach specific topics right at my finger tips.  Each book has a piece of card stock in front of it with the title, author and teaching focus on it.  My bins are organized by the order that I would teach specific topics throughout the year.  

I typed a list of all of the books that are currently in my mentor text bins.  I only keep my favorite books in the bins...ones that I know I will use year after year as mentor texts.  I don't want my bins to be cluttered with "maybe" books.  

Here is the list of my favorite mentor texts.  The list is not in any specific order.  You can click on the image below if you'd like to download a copy.