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Summer Mentor Text Countdown Week 7: Ways to End (or Begin) a Year of Writing with Mentor Texts

We have been sharing Moving Writers’ most popular posts about mentor texts as we move toward the September release of our book, Writing With Mentors. (Want a tiny sneak peek at the contents of Writing With Mentors? Check out our Table of Contents and a couple of reviews on the Heinemann site!) Last week in our Summer Mentor […]

Summer Mentor Text Countdown Week 6 – Mentor Texts for the First Week of School

Are you ready to start planning for the first week of school? We use mentor texts in our classes from the very first day of school. We want to lay down a strong foundation and also some strong expectations that mentor texts will be our go-to source for inspiring our work, giving us how-tos, and […]

Summer Mentor Text Countdown Week 5 – Mentor Sentences to Boost Student Writing

As you saw two weeks ago with our post about using mentor texts for Notebook Time, mentor texts can be large or small.  Even a tiny mentor text can have spectacular results for student writing. Mentor sentences can be a great way for both you and your students to wade into the waters of mentor text study! […]

Our Top 3 Tips for Using Your Summer to Plan Next Year’s Writing Workshop

My summer to-do list is LONG. In addition to around-the-house projects that only get done during the summer, trips to take, friends to see, and books to read, I have planning to do for the upcoming school year. I bet you do, too. A lot of writing workshop can’t be planned for — we have […]

A Mentor Text Goldmine for Movie Buffs and Writing Workshoppers Alike!

It seemed too good to be true when I first happened upon it: a database with hundreds of free Hollywood movie scripts, ready to download and dig in to for writing studies! I had landed upon The Internet Movie Script Database (not to be confused with the International Movie Database)  — an amazing resource for writing workshop. I […]