Eve Bunting has been one of my favorite children’s book authors ever since I read Fly Away, Home. I’ve used her books in my Reading Workshop, as demonstration texts and as social issue book club books. However, other than using Smokey Night during a personal narrative unit in 2006, I haven’t used Bunting’s books in my Writing Workshop. This past summer when I took a course on Mentor Texts at the TC Summer Writing Institute in August, I met a woman named C.J., who is a Literacy Specialist in North Carolina. She asked me why I didn’t use Buntings’ texts much with my students. (No one had ever asked me why I wasn’t using a text… more often people ask me why I do use them, how I use them, etc.) My response, essentially, was: Her writing is so hard for me to emulate as an adult… putting it in front of my students seems too challenging. Well, C.J., who is one of the wisest educators I’ve ever met, pushed me to rethink that decision. In a gentle way, she encouraged me to go beyond having kids mentor themselves after, say, a Bunting lead, and think a bit broader about how a Bunting text could be used with young writers. Note: She didn’t tell me how to do this. She just gave me the push I needed to think about Bunting as a mentor author, for my students, more closely.
I went to my bookshelf recently and looked at several Bunting books, in search of one I could find several uses for in a Writing Classroom. As I perused my Bunting Books, I found Gleam and Glow, a text I never read to my fourth or fifth graders. However, upon close reading of Gleam and Glow
now, it is a book I wish I used in both Reading Workshop and in Writing Workshop since the story, which is based off of a true story about finding hope in an unexpected place, is full of mentoring possibilities.
This book can be introduced during a personal narrative unit of study because it is written in the first person. It is much longer than the stories students are writing in upper elementary classrooms, but the fact that it’s a narrative helps make this text an exemplar for teaching the narrative genre. Gleam and Glow can also be carried around with you, in conferences, to help your students with the following elements of their own writing:
- Descriptive Language
- Point of View
- Powerful Endings
- Sequencing
- Voice
One final note: Thank you to C.J. for inspiring me to look at Bunting’s Books, as mentor texts, again.
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Stacey,
You do me great honor by giving ME the credit for your thinking about mentor text. What I DO know is that my own understanding regarding the impact of using mentor text has really changed. I have always thought that using a good book to model reading skills in front of children was important. What I now know is that a mentor text (used over and over) becomes a tool that can link what I think of as “parallel structures” we find in both reading and writing. I have written a few things in support of that idea. And when I attended the Teacher’s College February Institute on using mentor text to teach reading and writing well I learned that as teachers, we even need to become more intentional about our “verbage” within the two workshops. For example, teach that authors create images so their readers can ENVISION what is happening (in Reading Workshop) while in Writer’s Workshop teach students ways that (as writers) they too, can use words that will create images in the minds of their readers allowing them to ENVISION what is happening in the stories they write. It seems so simple…made SO much sense…but was NOT happening in the classrooms I coached… Reading and writing were separated by time and by content. Mentor text has now become the “hinge” that allows the cognitive door to swing freely between reading and writing since they actually represent the EXACT same set of cognitive skills… And for me, Eve Bunting has become MY mentor author for intermediate reading and writing because of the socially significant topics she seems to tackle so eloquently (homelessness, death of a child, pollution, war, just to name a few…) And by the way…our collaborative work this past summer has inspired me as well, my friend…Thanks Stacey!
CJ
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