Mentor Texts

1. Saturdays and Teacakes by Lester Laminack {This is one of my all time favorites. It is beautifully written, and lends itself to teaching personal narratives and memoirs. I love the repetition, the white space, the interesting way he writes dialogue without quotation marks, and I love the nostalgia.}
2. Emma Kate by Patricia Polacco {This book is fabulous for teaching synthesis. It's all about a friendship between an elephant and a little girl. It makes the kids wonder whether it's fantasy and they really are friends or if the elephant is an imaginary friend. They change their thinking a few times, and in the end, they learn that the elephant has an imaginary child. I always re-read it one more time once they make this realization!}
3. Fireflies by Julie Brinckloe {This book always tops my list for teaching inferring! It's beautifully written, and it helps kids connect to their own prior knowledge!}
4. The Great Fuzz Frenzy by Susan Stevens Crummel. {Of course, I have a soft spot for golden retrievers, but beyond that, this is a fabulous book for teaching predicting! It's also very easily tied into the bucket-filler/bucket-dipper concept. I love Crummel's fun placement of the text!}
5. The Memory String by Eve Bunting {Beautiful story! Great for making T-S connections!}
6. The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg {Great story to teach inferring! The kids have to pay close attention to the clues to infer that the stranger is Jack Frost. This is probably better suited for upper-elementary, because it's a definitely not obvious, but that's why I love it!}
7. A Day's Work by Eve Bunting {This is a great story about "the important things" like honesty. It's a great story about a young boy's relationship with his grandfather. 8. Owl Moon by Eve Bunting {I love this book! I have taught just about everything from mental images to poetic devices to owl adaptations with it. In fact, I have a pretty cross-curricular unit for sale in my TpT store that I used with my kiddos in my old school district. It's so much fun!} 9. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White {Such an oldie, but a goodie. I LOVE Charlotte's Web, because you can teach so much with it, if you break it into manageable chunks. I especially love how it lends itself to teaching about imagery and sensory details during the barn scene. I also totally LOVE the characters. I mean, who doesn't love Charlotte and Wilbur?! Of course, this is another book I used to extensively teach with back in the day, and I also have a unit that accompanies it.} 10. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech {I always like to read this book to launch discussions about the writing process. I also love it because it approaches poetry in a fresh way, and it exposes kids to the classics in a non-threatening way. It's also great for the kids who say they don't like to write.}
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12. The BFG by Roald Dahl {This is one I truly enjoy reading for the sake of reading it. The kids LOVE the story... I think it's because of the whizzpopping. Of course, it's Roald Dahl, so I have to soften a few things here and there, but this is the only book I have a consistent character voice for. I have cultivated my BFG voice over the years, and the kids eat it up with a spoon!}
13. The Lorax by Dr. Seuss {I should be excited that they are making a movie about this book, because I LOVE IT, but I'm sad they are adding so much to a book that I think is absolutely perfect. I love the rhythm, the lesson, the adorable Lorax, and I even sort-of have a soft-spot for the Once-ler. This is a just-plain-magical book that teaches about environmental concerns in a kid-friendly way. It's wonderful for making connections and starting an Earth Day discussion! The word "unless" carries so much weight...}
Okay, I'm going to have to take this another direction, because this is taking me FOREVER, and I am having a really difficult time narrowing it down. :) So, here's what I'll do. I'm going to point you in a few different directions if you are interested in more. First of all, feel free to check out my Donor's Choose link on the sidebar. There aren't any active grants right now, but I was fortunate to have a few funded last year, and several of them were for books that I salivated over and love. If you click on the links and scroll to the bottom of each page, you will see the book lists I picked out. In addition, if you haven't read them, you need to read the following teacher books that address reading workshop. Many of them make suggestions for books based on the reading strategies. I could get carried away with this too! These are my favorite reading resources at the moment. If you're impatient, you can also find lists online, but I highly recommend taking a gander at these fabulous books. They have totally sculpted and changed me as a teacher over the last few years. You can find book lists HERE... and all over the web.