What Do Authors Do? -- Must Read Mentor Text Linky

It's Sunday and time to link up with Collaboration Cuties for their Must Read Mentor Text Linky. Today's topic is language arts, so it's a perfect time to share a couple of texts I will be using this week--some must haves!!

Last Tuesday I shared how my students brainstormed what it means to be a writer.  This was purposely done without reading a text first.  The idea was for students to finish the sentence, "Writers..." with whatever ideas came to mind. They did a splendid job! You can learn about this lesson by clicking here...

As a follow-up to our brainstorming, I will be reading a wonderful text that I came across many moons ago at an IRA conference--What Do Author's Do? by Eileen Christelow.  It's a text that takes students on the journey that writer's take--a journey through the writing process.

I will read the text aloud and we will compare what we learn with our anchor chart by circling ideas that were mentioned in the text.  Then we will contrast by adding new ideas from the text to our chart. The text will also be used again later when talking about the writing process. This weekend, I was  pleasantly surprised to find a wonderful lesson using this text in Ruth Culham and Raymond Coutu's book Using Picture Books to Teach Writing With the Traits (K-2): An Annotated Bibliography of More than 150 Mentor Texts with Teacher-Tested Lessons. They have also published a Grade 3 and up version of this resource. Look for more information about this K-2 traits writing resources in a future Traits Tuesday post... 

Eileen Christelow also has written a companion to this text called What do Illustrators Do? You can actually purchase them as one! She also has a wonderful website!

Another great text that I will be using using when talking about the writing process is You Have to Write by Janet S. Wong. I came across this one at a literacy conference as well.  What I like best about this text is that it addresses the fact that writing is not always easy and that ideas and inspiration can come from many places.  

Both texts shared are appropriate for upper grades as well--a couple of must have texts!

Fly on over to Collaboration Cuties to read about some other wonderful language arts mentor texts!

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