My Favorite Resources for Mentor Texts
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of posting about my experiences building a culture of readers on one of my favorite blogs that I religiously follow, Three Teachers Talk. Several of our teachers have transformed their classrooms from a traditional whole class novel English class to a readers/writers workshop approach. One of the hardest tasks for teachers when making the switch is finding mentor texts to use in place of the whole class novel. Here are some of my favorite resources that I have found texts for the teachers I work with:
Three Teachers Talk
Amy Rasmussan, Erika Bogdany, Shana Karnes, and Jackie Catcher (@amyrass, @ErikaBogdany, @litreader, @JackieCatcher) are four high school teachers who firmly believe in using readers/ writers workshop in their classrooms. Each morning I wake to find a post that I can use to support the teachers that I work with in our English department. They share resources like 51 Beautiful Sentences and how they use them to teach author's craft. They share excerpts from books like Brown Girl Dreaming, The Glass Castle, and Impulse and how they use them to teach rhetorical devices and book talk books at the same time. Their ideas and lessons are simple and easy to adapt to any level English class. I highly recommend following their blog if you are looking for ideas.
Moving Writers and Mentor Text Dropbox
My other favorite teacher blog to follow was created by Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell (@RebekahOdell1, @allisonmarchett). These two teachers have focused their blog on writing workshop resources and lesson ideas. What I love most about their blog (beyond the posts) is the Mentor Text Dropbox that they have created. You can find articles by genre, technique, topic, etc. in this folder. When teacher's are looking for something specific, I send them here first.
Twitter
Twitter can be very overwhelming if you don't have it organized. I tend to use Hootsuite to follow hashtags like #engchat, #elachat, #nerdybookclub, #aplangchat, and #aplitchat. Teachers are constantly posting ideas and articles to use in the classroom. Don't feel obligated to check it all the time. Even when I open it up once a week, I find wonderful resources here that I can share with teachers.
Newsela
If you haven't checked out Newsela for nonfiction articles, you are missing out on current events that can be read at multiple lexile levels. I tend to turn to Newsela for current events and articles of the week as the topics are very appealing and relevant for students to understand. Newsela also posts Pro/Con articles which helps our students look at a topic from multiple perspectives. All of the articles are free and you can create a class account (our students sign in with Google) where you assign specific articles to the students to read. What I love most is that I may say to the students that they have to read the article at ____ level to take the quiz, but they can start at any level that they prefer. Many of the students will start at a simpler level to get a basic understanding and then read it at the assigned level.
Another place I find unique articles to share with staff and students is on Flipboard. Flipboard is a tool I use to create multiple "magazines" with various topics. It used to be only available on the iPad, but now can also be used on the web so our students have access to it 24/7 from their Chromebooks. The best part of Flipboard for me is that it does the curating of articles for me under the topics I have tagged to search. I can open up Flipboard and have resources at my fingertips. I am even working with a teacher right now who is having his freshman AP World students collect reliable resources for their themes using Flipboard.
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