Lynne R. Dorfman

In their first edition of Mentor Texts, authors Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli helped teachers across the country make the most of high-quality children's literature in their writing instruction. In Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6, 2nd Edition the authors continue to show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers by using literature as their foundation. 

The second edition includes brand-new “Your Turn Lessons,” built around the gradual release of responsibility model, offering suggestions for demonstrations and shared or guided writing. Reflection is emphasized as a necessary component to understanding why mentor authors chose certain strategies, literary devices, sentence structures, and words. Dorfman and Cappelli offer new children's book titles in each chapter and in a carefully curated and annotated Treasure Chest. At the end of each chapter a “Think About It—Talk About It—Write About It” section invites reflection and conversation with colleagues.

The book is organized around the characteristics of good writing—focus, content, organization, style, and conventions. The authors write in a friendly and conversational style, employing numerous anecdotes to help teachers visualize the process, and offer strategies that can be immediately implemented in the classroom. This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers.
 

If you are a teacher of grades K-6, you might be asking, "Shoud I teach grammar in my class on a daily basis? How would I go about doing this? And how can I teach grammar so it isn't boring to my kids?" In Grammar Matters, Lynne Dofman and Diane Dougherty answer these questions and more. Using mentor texts as the cornerstone for how best to teach grammar, this book provides teachers with almost everything they need to get kids not only engaged but excited about learning grammar.

Divided into four parts--Narrative Writing, Informational Writing, Opinion Writing, and Grammar Conversations--this hand reference provides practical teaching tips, assessment ideas, grammar definitions, and specific mentor texts to help students learn about parts of speech, idoms, usage issues, and punctuation. Through "Your Turn Lessons," conversations, conferences, and drafting, revising, and editing exercies, students will learn not only specific concepts but also how to reflect upon and transfer what they have learned to other writing tasks, no matter the subject.

The "Treasure Chest of Children's Books" provides an extensive list of both fiction and nonfiction books that fit naturally into grammar instruction. Eight appendices provide even more resources, including information on homophones, using mentor texts to teach grammar and conventions, checklists, comma rules, help for ELL students, and a glossary of ramar terms.

Grammar Matters links instruction to the Common Core State Standards and features quality, classroom-tested tools that help teachers provide their students with the gifts of grammar and literacy.

In A Closer Look, Lynne Dorfman and Diane Dougherty provide the tools and strategies you need to use formative assessment in writing workshop. Through Lynne and Diane’s ideas, you will be able to establish an environment where students will internalize ways that they can assess their own writing and become independent writers.

Lynne and Diane share methods for collecting and managing information, and show practical, simple, and concise ways to document student thinking. In the accompanying online videos, they demonstrate conferences with individual writers, small groups, and whole groups. Quick, easy-to-manage assessment methods emphasize that formative assessment does not have to take a long time to be worthwhile and effective. Vignettes from classroom teachers, principals, and authors add a variety of perspectives and classroom experiences on this important topic.

A Closer Look shows that when students are in charge of their own writing process and set and reach their own goals, writing becomes a vibrant, energetic part of the day.
 

Building on the success of Mentor Texts and Nonfiction Mentor Texts, authors Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli now turn their attention to poetry. In Poetry Mentor Texts, Lynne and Rose show teachers how to use poems in both reading and writing workshops and across content areas. Written in a friendly, conversational tone, this practical book explores a variety of poetic forms, including poems that inspire response, list poems, acrostic poems, persona poems, and poems for two voices—versatile forms of poetry that can be used in every grade.

Each of these poetic forms has its own chapter featuring five poems with applications for both reading and writing classrooms. Reading connections present skills and strategies to move students forward as readers, helping them to build fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, phonemic awareness, and phonics. Writing connections help students and teachers discover their own voices and grow as poets and wordsmiths as they try out many poetic forms. Poems help students at all grade levels learn to better address complex reading texts, offering them a chance to dig deeper and use higher-order thinking skills. Additionally, Your Turn writing lessons provide a scaffold for seamlessly moving from modeling to the shared or guided experience and the transfer to independent work. The Treasure Chest offers a brief annotation of the poems discussed in each chapter as well as companion pieces that extend and enhance the work of the reading and writing classroom.

Poetry Mentor Texts helps teachers across the curriculum guide their students to become not only skilled readers and writers but also more empathetic human beings.

How do children's book authors create the wonder that we feel when reading our favorite books? What can students and teachers learn from these authors and books if we let them serve as writing mentors? In Mentor Texts, Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers, using literature as their foundation.

The book is organized around the characteristics of good writing—focus, content, organization, style, and conventions—and includes:mentor texts that can be used to scaffold student work;student writing examples to demonstrate how students take risks as writers;teacher writing examples to show the power of teacher as writer;a comprehensive annotated list of children's literature that includes specific suggestions for teaching points;“Your Turn” lessons at the end of each chapter that show how to put the ideas into practice.

Rose and Lynne write in a friendly and conversational style, employing numerous anecdotes to help teachers visualize the process, and offer strategies that can be immediately implemented in the classroom. Each “Your Turn” lesson is built around the gradual release of responsibility model, offering suggestions for demonstrations and shared or guided writing. Reflection is emphasized as a necessary component to understanding why mentor authors chose certain strategies, literary devices, sentence structures, and words.

This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers. It shows teachers and students how to discover the ways that authors make writing come alive, and how to use that knowledge to inspire and improve their own writing.