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Mentor Texts: Offering Options for Expository Writing
Kathy Everts Danielson
University of Nebraska at Omaha
email: [email protected]
“This is fun!” This quote came from a third grader making a Fandex page of an animal that she was studying. How often has expository writing been thought of as fun?
Nonfiction and expository writing have been defined as the literature of facts (Kristo & Bamford, 2004). This type of writing is what students will encounter most in their years of school in terms of writing expectations (Graves, 1994) and has been a big focus of the Common Core Standards (Gewertz, 2012). Yet it is often true that teachers “have not always found the teaching of nonfiction writing to be joyful or rewarding” (Dorfman & Cappelli, 2009, p.278).
Mentor texts that model expository writing in various ways can be used as a way to encourage students to enjoy the process of writing nonfiction and can be an effective writing strategy (Gallagher, 2011; Ray, 2006; Pytash & Morgan, 2013). Dorfman & Cappelli (2009) offer this as one of the top ten reasons why students should be writing nonfiction: “To make use of powerful scaffolds to help create new and enjoyable patterns for our writing” (Dorfman & Cappelli, 2009, p. 7).
Many of the examples in this article are tied to social studies or science themes. Writing with mentor texts throughout the curriculum should be encouraged. “While different content area teachers might ask students to write in different genres and use language specific to the content area, studying mentor texts is a framework for teaching writing that can be beneficial” (Pytash & Morgan, 2014, p. 101). Indeed, Culham (2014) suggested “teaching writing in every subject using mentor texts to model how great writing looks in that context” (p.30) as one of her sensible principles of teaching writing.
Editors' Note: All underlined book titles in this article indicate a hyperlink is available for more information about that text.
In addition, the following common core standard (and the similar standard at all grade levels) can be met using mentor text writing for nonfiction:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.1.2
Write informative/explanatory texts in which they name a topic, supply some facts about the topic, and provide some sense of closure (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).
What follows is an annotated bibliography of seven inviting nonfiction mentor texts that will encourage students to write their own literature of facts and make it an engaging, rather than a boring, writing experience. Students should be encouraged to read like a writer (Ray, 2006) as they read and discuss the patterns inherent in these books.
Many of these books come from Children’s Choices Booklists. Children’s Choices are books that children across America vote on as their favorite books. Sponsored by the International Literacy Association, these are books that children enjoy and respond well to, since they themselves have voted on the lists. For a comprehensive list of Children’s Choices, see:
https://www.literacyworldwide.org/get-resources/reading-lists/childrens-choices-reading-list