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The kindergarten class opens The Relatives Came and locates the last page. Ms. Nunnery reads, "And when they were finally home in Virginia, they crawled into their silent, soft beds and dreamed about the next summer." Evelyn's hand quickly shoots up as she exclaims, "Booyah! Cynthia Rylant used 'finally' to show the story was ending."
Evelyn's enthusiastic reaction is a sign that she feels she is working through and understanding text shoulder-to-shoulder with her teacher and with the author, Cynthia Rylant. She is celebrating Ms. Rylant's ending as a fellow author.
Since her students are fairly adept at noticing words and phrases used at the ending of several books, Ms. Nunnery takes the opportunity to extend the learning to this same passage. "Yes, Cynthia Rylant showed us that the story was ending by using the word 'finally,' but what other words does she use on this page to paint a picture of this final scene?" Children generate "crawled into their silent, soft beds" and "next summer."
Ms. Nunnery decides to use the idea of "next summer" to model the use of certain words and phrases to signal the end of a story. As a literacy coach, she has been helping the class the past few months write their own books; now she revises the final page of her book about a summer trip to say, "And when I was finally home in Nashville, I laid my head on my pillow and dreamed of my next trip to New York." While still on the rug, the kindergartners select one of their own books from personal folders and work to revise its ending.
In this opening vignette, the children were deeply engaged with a book that exemplified a particular writing move-ending a story. As such, it served as a mentor text for the class. Mentor texts are pieces of literature that offer inspiration and guidance for children to try out new strategies, genres, and craft moves in their own writing. They are models of great writing in any form or genre, including both narrative and informational styles, and can influence children's writing from kindergarten through grade 8 (Graham, Harris, & Santangelo 2015). In this article, we will explore what is known about using mentor texts in the...