Toolkit Tuesday

 making exemplar text 

what can we add to our teacher toolkit? we can add mentor text created by you... the classroom teacher!  

we first learned about the idea of adding stories to your writers toolkit by celena larkey. we have been creating stories for examples during our mini-lesson's but celena made us realize we should be creating exemplar text for the different thing we teach to our students during the workshop time.

tiny tips when creating exemplar text:

•  refer to the checklist from the units being taught
• look at student writing and exemplars in the pathways book
• work as a team to create examples attending to structure and development
• create examples that are similar to your students' work 

tiny tip: make one story with pictures and PHOTO copy it five times. if you look closely below you will notice that i kept making the picture over and over again. 

here is an example we created focusing on kindergarten

how can i use these exemplar stories in my classroom?

INQUIRY

• pose questions and work together with students
• for example if you have a child who is creating a bare bone book you could use the demonstration or student sample to show them how to add words or labels to lift the level of their writing.
• if you have children that need support with elaboration show them how you went back to the ghosting book and added more details using the green pen    
• put a plastic sleeve over a page of the exemplar story and let students give it a try
• leave an artifact of what you taught

happy tuesday toolkits!

jessica & laura & melissa