Mentor Texts is a highly used teaching strategy to get students to emulate authors in their own writing. [see How-To Post]. In my experience and searches, I see that there are a lot of places to find fiction mentor texts, but nonfiction texts seem to be a bit more elusive. Here we share some ideas for nonfiction mentor texts with you! We would love to hear your favorites – share in the comments!
Generating Ideas
Animals and Plants: Let’s face it, kids love animals, they have prior knowledge, and it’s probably a big topic of what they want to write about. So here are some animal and plant books that might help students generate ideas to write about:
- Pink is for Blobfish – this book is a great way to get students interested in thinking about odd or unusual animals. This book can be used to get students to either learn more about one of the animals listed or share ideas on an animal they are already familiar with. Students can emulate Keating’s pages to write their own text.
- Animal Atlas for Kids: A Visual Journey of Wildlife from Around the World – we are loving this atlas that has beautiful photographic spreads of animals in categories, like biomes.
- Gecko – this book really shows how an author knows a lot about an animal, so he shared his information in a picture book. Students might think about animals they know about while listening to this book.
- The Animal Awards – there is so much that this book can deliver. On the surface, it will help students think about animals they know about. On a different level, students can make their own animal awards and create a class book! You choose your level!
Sports and Hobbies: Most kids play sports or have a special hobby that they can write about, here are some mentor texts:
- Soccermania/Futbolmania – this bilingual book explains soccer (futbol) in detail. There are a lot of biographies of athletes, but it’s important to have mentor texts that explain the sports since that is what we want the students to do.
- My First Book of Hockey – this book has engaging pictures and easy text explaining hockey. This could be used to get students to think about sports they can explain.
- 88 Instruments – this book can help students think of a musical instrument they can explain.
Text Features
- The Weird and Wonderful World of Bugs – each page has a graphic that is labeled, captions, and bold face words.
- The Magic and Mystery of Trees – lot’s of goodies in this book for text features. Some highlights are a Table of Contents, headings, subheadings, introductions, and glossary.
- My Encyclopedia of Very Important Oceans – this picture book has insets, bold words, pronunciation keys, titles, and subtitles.
Facts, Details, Focus
- Biggest, Strongest, Fastest (or any Steve Jenkins book) – is great for word choice. His books always make a vague statement and then explain it in small font on the same page. For example: The African Elephant is the biggest land animal. On the same page in small font, Jenkins elaborates on the size of the animals and explains what “biggest” really means.
- Seymour Simon books – if you know me, you know that there is no way I would not mention Simon for nonfiction. He’s a go to for nonfiction mentor texts. All of his texts paint a picture for the reader. Definitely use his books for students to emulate figurative language in nonfiction.
- Teeth – while not terribly exciting, this book easily models how to stay on topic. Each page is about something teeth do and the entire paragraph elaborates on that without getting off topic.
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