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500+ Mentor Texts: A Comprehensive List for Elementary Teachers

Mentor texts are an essential component of best practice teaching of literacy skills. This post will explore what mentor texts are, why they are so important for elementary teachers to use, and how to select high quality ones and implement them in your classroom. Read below to learn more!

What is a Mentor Text?

A mentor text, also known as an anchor text, is a book (or other piece of literature) that students can learn from. Teachers use them to model what good readers and writers do. They also use these books to provide real world examples of what authors do, as well as use them as a way to model what good readers do when working with texts. Teachers often reread the story multiple times and spend time exploring specific parts of it with particular goals in mind. The purpose is to study these texts and imitate them or how the teacher interacts with them to improve reading and writing skills.

Why are Mentor Texts Important?

Mentor texts are important because they help students confidently practice new reading and writing skills by giving them a real world example to base their future work off of. They also give teachers the opportunity to expose students to a variety of high quality literature that allow students to see themselves represented, as well as others who are different from them.

How to Choose a Mentor Text

Choosing mentor texts is simple with the help of our Starts With a Story Collection. We selected over 500 high quality picture books to pick from. We also identified which reading strategies, grammar skills, and SEL topics the books best lend themselves to. In each of our book companions, you’ll also find that we wrote a book summary to share with students and 30 writing prompts based on the book, as well as pulled key vocabulary and focus sentences directly from the story. Read below for simple steps for how to choose a mentor text.

1. Open the Starts With a Story Inventory and Alignment Guide

The first step is to open the Starts With a Story Inventory and Alignment Guide. You can get a better view of the list of books by clicking “view larger version” in the bottom right hand corner of the resource below.

2. Select a Strategy, Skill or Topic

Select a specific strategy, skill, or topic you are seeking to teach your students. You can scroll through the Starts With a Story Alignment Guide to get inspiration. Check out some examples below!

Reading Strategy Examples

  • Retelling
  • Summarizing
  • Analyzing Character
  • Identifying Author’s Purpose
  • Making Predictions
  • Sequencing
  • Visualizing
  • Synthesizing
  • Comparing and Contrasting
  • And more!

Grammar Skill Examples

  • Proper Nouns
  • Compound Words
  • Contractions
  • Adjectives
  • Interjections
  • Homophones
  • Synonyms
  • Ellipses
  • Alliteration
  • And more!

SEL Topic Examples

  • Empathy
  • Taking Ownership
  • Problem Solving
  • Friendship
  • Kindness
  • Growth Mindset
  • Goal Setting
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Resiliency
  • And more!

3. Filter the Starts With a Story Inventory and Alignment Guide

Use the filter tool located in the top left corner of the Starts With a Story Inventory and Alignment Guide to have a list generated of book titles that lend themselves to teaching the specific strategy, skill, or topic you are focusing on.

How to Use the Alignment Guide

How to Use Mentor Texts

Here are the steps for how to use mentor texts to deliver high quality literacy lessons:

1. Pick a Strategy, Skill or Topic

Select a specific strategy, skill, or topic you are seeking to teach your students. You can scroll through the Starts With a Story Alignment Guide to get inspiration.

2. Select a Book

Find a book that lends itself to teaching the strategy, skill or topic you chose (using our FREE Starts With a Story Inventory and Alignment Guide). Use the filter tool located in the top left corner of the alignment guide to have a list generated of book titles that lend themselves to teaching the specific strategy, skill, or topic you are focusing on.

3. Plan or Download Lessons

Plan a series of mini lessons based on the mentor text and strategy, skill, or topic you selected. Better yet, save yourself tons of time and scoop up our Starts With a Story book companion based on the book. Each book companion is packed with resources and activities to help you deliver excellent interactive read aloud lessons.

4. Implement the Lessons

The next step is to implement the lessons you created or downloaded from our Starts With a Story Collection. You may find delivering these types of lessons to be best suited for having your students sit in a whole group area with you in front of them.

5. Reflect

The last step is to reflect on the experience. How did it go? What worked well? What are ways to improve your lesson?

In closing, we hope you found this post about using mentor texts in your elementary classroom helpful! If you did, then you may also be interested in these posts:

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