My project needs a collection of 36 books that range from folktales to realistic fiction. The mentor authors are Tomie DePaola, Ezra Jack Keats and Angela Johnson.
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I am a second grade teacher in a low income school in Washington Heights, New York. I have a class of 28 students that have shown great interest and enthusiasm in their writing and I want to be able to challenge them and continue to develop their writing skills.
As I thought about the ways that I could support them in their writing development, I could not help but consider the importance of mentor authors. These authors would provide valuable resources that my students could turn to in order to "borrow" ideas for their own writings. For example, if students were having difficulty including dialogue in their stories, they could turn to books from Tomie DePaola, Ezra Jack Keats or Angela Johnson and see how these authors use dialogue in their books; they would be able to use these techniques in their own writing.
It is important for students to have authors they can refer to in order to get support for their own writing. If they are to consider themselves authors, they need to learn how authors use writing craft. In order to be able to support my students in writing by using authors as mentors I need these resources since my classroom library does not have books on these authors for such a in depth study.
I would love to do author studies on these authors and discuss the various writing crafts they use in their books. DePaola, Keats and Johnson are wonderful authors of children's books that write about topics that children can relate to. As we learn about the various writing crafts while taking pleasure in the wonderful stories, students will try them out in their writing.
It would be a great opportunity to get to know the authors and the various characters in the stories. It will be amazing to watch my students turn to their favorite author and/or book and work on improving their writing. It will also be amazing to hear them discuss the writing in their own stories.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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