Mentor Text: Up. Dir. Pete Docter. Pixar, 2009. Story is the lifeblood of all good writing. But students don’t realize its power until they are explicitly shown how it works across all genres of writing. An editorial tells the story of an issue. A memoir tells the story of a life. An analysis tells the story of […]
Author: Allison Marchetti
Mom, Teacher, Writer, Postpartum Doula.
Books: Writing with Mentors & Beyond Literary Analysis (Heinemann)
Responding to the Writer, Not the Writing
Lucy Calkins’ wisdom about teaching the writer (and not the writing) continues to reverberate decades after the publication of her book The Art of Teaching Writing. Yet many of us do not teach in a way that promotes writers. I know because I was one of them. In the past, I taught writing one composition […]
A Lesson for Tomorrow: Using Art to Teach Repetition in Writing and Reading
Students are great barometers of lesson effectiveness. At the end of each writing workshop genre study, I ask students to reflect on the lessons that had an impact on their thinking and writing. When asked which mini-lesson she found to be the least helpful in our memoir genre study, a student wrote: The mini-lesson I […]
Mentor Text Wednesday: Carol Sherman-Jones’ “A Lesson Not Learned”
Mentor Text: Sherman-Jones, Carol. “A Lesson Not Learned.” I Thought My Father Was God. Ed. Paul Auster. New York: Picador, 2001. 52-53. Print. Writing Workshop Genre: Memoir Background: When asked which mentor text had the biggest impact on their thinking and writing in our memoir genre study, most students credited “A Lesson Not Learned” by […]
The Fifth Pillar of Writing Workshop
Lucy Calkins says that kids “need to see their work reach other readers.” This explains why I spent much of winter break planning and writing posts for the new blog, checking blog stats, and refreshing my Twitter feed. Have my words reached anyone? Have they made a difference? A blogging neophyte, I had almost forgotten […]
Step-by-Step: The Value of Mini Mentor Texts
A few months before our wedding, my husband and I signed up for private dance lessons at the local dance studio. On the first day, we were brought into a small room with a large rectangular window that looked out into the main ballroom. Professional dancers in street clothes leapt and arabesqued across the wooden […]
moving writers 