Learning Objectives
The unit will focus on identifying desired features of quality mentor essays or books to assist educators in making level appropriate selections to then explicitly teach these same features to students. Through a workshop approach, both teacher and students will then use the mentor essays to guide their own writing. The intent is to establish familiarity with author’s craft through building and using a mentor text library while engaging in an authentic writing process. Additionally, writing work will be shared across grade-levels to increase engagement and provide audience and authentic purpose to the student authors. Rigor in writing is achieved when “we bring complex ideas and sentence structures to students through well chosen mentor texts, we give them a vision of what is possible, and they have a model they can aspire to emulate.”4
As part of building the author’s craft, the unit will include students keeping a “Noticing Notebook” for anecdotes, descriptions, interviews and vocabulary. I feel that this approach will effectively model techniques that encourage risk taking in writing. Sharing my own writing challenges and processes with my students allows them to feel more comfortable making their own attempts. Working with peer and role-model writers, as well as being a role-model creates another level of authenticity to students’ writing tasks.
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