Craft Moves: Lesson Sets for Teaching Writing with Mentor Texts

How do you choose mentor texts for your students? How do you mine them for the craft lessons you want your students to learn?

In Craft Moves, Stacey Shubitz, cofounder of the Two Writing Teachers website, does the heavy lifting for you: using twenty recently published picture books, she creates more than 180 lessons to teach various craft moves that will help your students become better writers.

Stacey first discusses picture books as teaching tools and offers ways to integrate them into your curriculum, and classroom discussions. She also shares routines and classroom procedures to help students focus on their writing during the independent writing portion of writing workshop and helps teachers prepare for small-group instruction.

Each of the 184 lessons in the book includes a publisher’s summary, a rationale or explanation of the craft move demonstrated in the book, and a procedure that takes teachers and students back into the mentor text to deepen their understanding of the selected craft move. A step-by-step guide demonstrates how to analyze a picture book for multiple craft moves.

Using picture books as mentor texts will help your students not only read as writers and write with joy but also become writers who can effectively communicate meaning, structure their writing, write with detail, and give their writing their own unique voice.