How do children's book authors create the wonder that we feel when reading our favorite books? What can students and teachers learn from these authors and books if we let them serve as writing mentors? In Mentor Texts, Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers, using literature as their foundation.

The book is organized around the characteristics of good writing focus, content, organization, style, and conventions and includes:

• mentor texts that can be used to scaffold student work;
• student writing examples to demonstrate how students take risks as writers;
• teacher writing examples to show the power of teacher as writer;
• a comprehensive annotated list of children's literature that includes specific suggestions for teaching points;
• Your Turn lessons at the end of each chapter that show how to put the ideas into practice.

Rose and Lynne write in a friendly and conversational style, employing numerous anecdotes to help teachers visualize the process, and offer strategies that can be immediately implemented in the classroom. Each Your Turn lesson is built around the gradual release of responsibility model, offering suggestions for demonstrations and shared or guided writing. Reflection is emphasized as a necessary component to understanding why mentor authors chose certain strategies, literary devices, sentence structures, and words.

This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers. It shows teachers and students how to discover the ways that authors make writing come alive, and how to use that knowledge to inspire and improve their own writing.

Reading and writing across content areas is emphasized in the standards and on high-stakes tests at the state and national level. As educators seek to incorporate content-area literacy into their teaching, they confront a maze of theories, instructional strategies, and acronyms like REAP and RAFT. Teachers who do work their way through the myriad content reading and writing strategies are discovering not all activities are appropriate for content instruction: only those with a strong research base meet the high standards expected in classrooms today.

Janet Allen developed the ideal support for teachers who want to improve their reading instruction across the curriculum. Tools for Teaching Content Literacy is a compact tabbed flipchart designed as a ready reference for content reading and writing instruction.

Each of the thirty-three strategies includes:
• a brief description and purpose for each strategy;
• a research base that documents the origin and effectiveness of the strategy;
• graphic organizers to support the lesson;
• classroom vignettes from different grade levels and content areas to illustrate the strategy in use.

The perfect size to slip into a plan book, Tools highlights effective instructional strategies and innovative ideas to help you design lessons that meet your students’ academic needs as well as content standards. The definitions, descriptions, and research sources also provide a quick reference when implementing state and national standards, designing assessments, writing grants, or evaluating resources for literacy instruction.