Mentor Texts and Journal Articles and Professional Books… Oh My!

A BIG thank you to the people who graciously responded to the post I wrote in March when I was compiling the book list for the graduate course I’m teaching.  The titles you suggested were great additions to the rough draft of the book list I had compiled.  Unfortunately, some of the books were not available in the university library system, so I was unable to have them pulled and put on the book cart for my classroom.  (Sigh.)  That being said, there are over 140 books that will be on the cart in my classroom when the class I’m teaching begins on Monday.  This means my students will have many choices when they pick books to use as a demonstration text for the minilesson they’ll prepare and deliver and for the craft table they’ll create.

For those of you who are interested in seeing the final list, you can click on the link below to download it.

Books Available on the Classroom Cart

Further, I have quite a few books and poems I’ll be reading aloud and using in my lectures and in writing exercises with my students.  Those texts are:

• “Eleven” (from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories) by Sandra Cisneros
• Happy Like Soccer by Maribeth Boelts
• —I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff
• Looking at Lincoln by Maira Kalman
• “Millions of Strawberries” by Genevieve Taggard
• “My Side of the Story” (from First French Kiss and Other Traumas) by Adam Bagdasarian
• Silver Seeds: A Book of Nature Poems by Paul Paolilli and Dan Brewer
• “Skating in the Wind” by Kristine O’Connell George
• “Soap Bubble” by Valerie Worth
• Sophie’s Fish by A.E. Cannon
• Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts
• What You Wish For: A Book for Darfurcompiled by Book Wish Foundation
  • Specifically my students will be reading “Wishes” by Jane Yolen, “What I Wish For” by Gary Soto, “Secret Song” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and “I Wish I Could Live (in a book)” by Nikki Giovanni.
• “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon

Also, when we study argument writing, they’ll be reading the following opinion articles prior to drafting their own op-ed pieces:

• “žA Very Pricey Pineapple” by Gail Collins
• ž“Now Coveted: A Walkable, Convenient Place” by Christopher B. Leinberger
• “žTexting While Walking” by Casey Neistat
• “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle
• “Too Young for Status Updates” by Peggy Orenstein

Finally, for those of you who are interested in getting a hold of some journal articles about using children’s literature to enhance the teaching of writing, here’s the list of journal articles I put on reserve for my students to use in conjunction with the course I’m teaching.

• Gay, C. (1976). Reading aloud and learning to write. The Elementary School   Journal, 77: 87-93.
• Gilles, C. (2000). Talking about Books “Mem’s the Word”: Examining the Writing of Mem Fox. Language Arts, 77, 250-257.
• Griffith, R.R. (2010). Students Learn to Read Like Writers: A Framework for Teachers of Writing. Reading Horizons, 50, 49-66.
• Lancia, P.J. (1997). Literary borrowing: The effects of literature on children’s writing. The Reading Teacher, 50, 470-475.
• Moss, B. and Kane, C. (2010). Using Multicultural Mentor Texts to Teach Writing. In L. Smolen, and R. Oswald (Eds.), Multicultural Literature and Response: Affirming Diverse Voices (pp. 357-370). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
• Napoli, M. and Ritholz, E.R. (2009). Using Jacqueline Woodson’s Locomotion with Middle School Readers. Voices from the Middle, 16, 31-39.
• Ray, K.W. (2006). Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop. Language Arts, 83, 238-247.
• Shubitz, S. (2009). Using Mentor Texts to Differentiate for Young Writers. Statement, 45, 24-26.
• Smolkin, L.B., Donovanm C. & Labbo, L.D. (2005). Looking Closely at a Science Trade Book: Gail Gibbons and Multimodal Literacy. Language Arts, 83, 5.