Mentor Author, Mentor Texts

Mentor Author, Mentor Texts
by Ralph Fletcher


I've read and used other teacher books by Ralph Fletcher so I was excited to read this book. Mentor Author, Mentor Texts was a quick read that I will soon be using with my fifth grade students. It contains 24 different short stories, essays, non-fiction pieces, or poems.  Each piece is printed neatly and teachers are allowed to photocopy them for student use.  Each piece also comes with an explanation of the craft choices Mr. Fletcher used when creating the piece.  Three of the pieces have multiple drafts so students can see the revisions Mr. Fletcher made.

This book provides excellent writing samples to share with your children.  Mr. Fletcher makes some keys points about how to use the samples. First read each piece multiple times. Second, instead of telling students what to notice, ask them what they notice happening in the piece.  (I was first exposed to this idea of noticing after reading Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined.) I think it is a great idea because it allows each student to learn from where they are at.  Third, use Mr. Fletcher's explanation of craft choices to show how authors make many deliberate decisions when writing.

While I haven't used the book yet because I wanted to finish it before taking it into school, it has already  inspired a great writing lesson.  My students are currently working on writing mini-mysteries.  After reading "The Old Baseball", where Mr. Fletcher writes the same story from multiple points of view, I decided I needed to do a mini-lesson on point of view.  Each of my students wrote a story about playing catch with a football with me.  The first story was from their point of view.  The second story was from my point of view.  The third story was from the football's point of view.  The students had fun and did some great writing.  I then asked each child to consider whose point of view they wanted to tell their mystery from. At least one student is going to tell the story from the missing object's point of view and another is going to tell the story from a dog's point of view.

If you purchase the hard copy of the book you also get access to a digital copy of the book online.  It appears to be an exact copy that would be great for projecting onto a whiteboard.  Sixteen of the stories are also read aloud by Mr. Fletcher on the online version.  I don't believe you can download the materials, but once you register with Heinemann, using the resource is very simple.

First Published: 2011


Genre: Teaching Writing


Available at: Amazon and Barnes and Noble