ICYMI and Giveaway Winner: Modernizing Mentor Texts

If you’ve joined Two Writing Teacher’s series on Modernizing Mentor Texts each day these past few weeks, thank you for following along! If you’re just joining us or catching up, welcome; there are so many ideas and resources to explore, and this post serves as a round-up of all of the highlights from the series.

This series focused on the importance and use of mentor texts in writing and the evolution of the definition of mentor texts. Our team took a deep dive into using various types of mentor texts, strategies for building student agency, and some of the countless ways to bring mentor texts to life in the classroom.

Here are the highlights and links to each post:

• Melanie launched the series with a deep dive into the power of mentor texts and clarity around the difference between mentor texts, demonstration texts, exemplar texts, and craft moves.
• I shared ideas for unpacking multimedia mentor texts, a less conventional but powerful tool to hook writers and push them in new directions.
• Betsy explored the value of opinion mentor texts and embedding the use of AI.
• Stacey sparked our curiosity about infographics as mentor texts and shared a goldmine of resources for classroom use.
• Leah emphasized helping our students “read like writers” as she showcased strategies for helping even our youngest writers gain independence using mentor texts for both writing and illustrating.
• Lainie highlighted strategies for selecting and using student-written mentor texts with various entry points into this work for both students and teachers.
• Jenna closed out the series with a focus on our youngest writers, presenting strategies for modernizing mentor texts for students with emergent literacy skills.