My friend and colleague wants me to work on listing the picture books I use to teach writing… I don’t want to do it I tell her. I tell her the books are all in my head. It’s true…I’ll be driving to work and suddenly find myself putting the pieces together for a fantastic lesson with an amazing picture book that is absolutely perfect. Arriving at the classroom I sidestep every thing else I had planned to do to find the book, write the lesson and, then and only then, return to my originally scheduled day. If I had a list, I can assure you I would not know the whereabouts of the list on a regular basis. But, I like my friend and I’m going to make some book lists…
Books about sentences
The punctuation marks in Mr. Wright’s class take a vacation. Students experience how difficult reading is without punctuation as they read postcards from the vacationing punctuation friends.
In this companion book to Punctuation Takes a Vacation, titled Nouns and Verbs Have a Field Day, Mr.Wright’s class is having a field day and the nouns and verbs must learn to work together as a team to be successful at the games.
Books to teach story plot with emphasis on rising and falling action
In this story, the main character is one step away from disaster several times which provides a good context for analyzing events as main events and events that function to ” move the story along.” We created a large line plot to show rising action and falling action. Also a great book to teach the difference between retell and summarizing by using only the main events to summarize!
To be continued…on another level. I think the idea of using a mentor text to teach writing is being confused, by me, with using the text we are reading as a springboard for our opinion, explanatory and narrative writing.
patrice sutton on education... 
I need those books for my office.
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