"Penny Kittle's brilliant book, Micro Mentor Texts, is an invitation for teachers to forever change the way their students engage with writing in the classroom.  Truth is, the best writing teacher in the world is great literature.  But in this book, Penny not only curates a wonderful range of diverse short passages, she also invites teachers and students to look closely at the craft moves writers have made before sharing some of her own rich insights about each passage.  She then invites students to imitate some of the craft moves they've just observed, while writing from whatever space feels most exciting to them. But what I find truly invaluable about this book is the modeling Penny does before she invites students to write." - Matt De La Pena, New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medal winner

First:  Notice

*In each chapter of her book, you will find a list of what Kittle notices in one passage from a great book - or one micro mentor text.

*Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher have also teamed up to share mentor texts they have found and used across genres in this great padlet.  Click the link below to view:

https://padlet.com/pennykittle/mentor-text-study-essays-more-geb7m43xckz8rch9

Second:  Imitate

*Once you choose your text, you'll practice noticing and applying the craft moves with Kittle, as she drafts a passage of her own.  

**NOTE: I really like using a Number/Chunk/Annotate  technique I learned from Landrum High English Teacher, Laurin Baker 

*Use left margin for annotating for Content (what the author is saying)

*Use right margin for annotating for Craft (how the author is saying it)

*You can use the bottom margin for Why (analyzing author's purpose/theme/tone)

Third:  Your Turn

*Next, Kittle gives you a collection of micro mentor texts to use with your students.  You will later write details you notice about them and then model the problem-solving that powers imitation.  In the process, you will learn the twin powers of writing with students: to bind a classroom community and to share the joy of crafting sentences.

Fourth:  Their Turn: Independent Practice

*Last, Kittle gives ideas for leading your students to collect their own micro mentor texts independently - and to use them to inspire their own writing. 

To see an example of this, click on the link below or the picture to the right to 

https://www.edutopia.org/article/micro-mentor-texts-to-teach-writing/ 

In a recent craft study lesson with 9th graders in Honors English I, we read an excerpt from Sue Monk Kidd's Secret Life of Bees to zoom in on the author's use of sensory detail.

Pages 12-15 Secret Life of Bees Excerpt

After zooming in on the craft of sensory detail in this excerpt, we made our top 5 list of objects that were special to us that may hold possibilities for our writing.

Dawn's Top 5 List  

Next, we looked at other micro mentor texts that utilized effective sensory imagery as well as a list structure.  See excerpts below.

"Chapter 1: A man who buys books because they're pretty

"My mother and father were born in the most beautiful place on earth, in the foothills of the Appalachians along the Alabama-Georgia line. It was a place where gray mists hid the tops of low, deep-green mountains, where redbone and bluetick hounds flashed through the pines as they chased possums into the sacks of old men in frayed overalls, where old women in bonnets dipped Bruton snuff and hummed "Faded Love and Winter Roses" as they shelled purple hulls, canned peaches and made biscuits too good for this world. It was a place where playing the church piano loud was near as important as playing it right, where fearless young men steered long, black Buicks loaded with yellow whiskey down roads the color of dried blood, where the first frost meant hog killin' time and the mouthwatering smell of cracklin's would drift for acres from giant, bubbling pots. It was a place where the screams of panthers, like a woman's anguished cry, still haunted the most remote ridges and hollows in the dead of night, where children believed they could choke off the cries of night birds by circling one wrist with a thumb and forefinger and squeezing tight, and where the cotton blew off the wagons and hung like scraps of cloud in the branches of trees."

"In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble, an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salt and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness."

"Saturday night smells of biscuits and burning hair. 

Supper done and my grandmother has transformed 

the kitchen into a beauty shop. Laid across the table 

is the hot comb, Dixie Peach hair grease, 

horsehair brush, parting stick 

and one girl at a time. 

Jackie first, my sister says, 

our freshly washed hair damp 

and spiraling over toweled shoulders 

and pale cotton nightgowns. 

She opens her book to the marked page, 

curls up in a chair pulled close 

to the wood-burning stove, bowl of peanuts in her lap. 

The words 

in her books are so small, I have to squint 

to see the letters. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates. 

The House at Pooh Corner. Swiss Family Robinson. 

Thick books 

dog-eared from the handing down from neighbor 

to neighbor. My sister handles them gently, 

marks the pages with torn brown pieces 

of paper bag, wipes her hands before going 

beyond the hardbound covers. 

Read to me, I say, my eyes and scalp already stinging 

from the tug of the brush through my hair. 

And while my grandmother sets the hot comb 

on the flame, heats it just enough to pull 

my tight curls straighter, my sister’s voice 

wafts over the kitchen, 

past the smell of hair and oil and flame, settles 

like a hand on my shoulder and holds me there. 

I want silver skates like Hans’s, a place 

on a desert island. I have never seen the ocean 

but this, too, I can imagine—blue water pouring 

over red dirt. 

As my sister reads, the pictures begin forming 

as though someone has turned on a television, 

lowered the sound, 

pulled it up close. 

Grainy black-and-white pictures come slowly at me 

Deep. Infinite. Remembered 

On a bright December morning long ago . . . 

My sister’s clear soft voice opens up the world to me. 

I lean in 

so hungry for it. 

Hold still now, my grandmother warns. 

So I sit on my hands to keep my mind 

off my hurting head, and my whole body still. 

But the rest of me is already leaving, 

the rest of me is already gone."

After we engaged in close craft study of our micro texts, we then went back to our list of objects that were meaningful to us and chose one to write using some of the techniques we noticed, specifically sensory imagery and a list structure.  Here is my writing draft:

My Example:  Papa Pete and the Pony

Student Example: My 10th Birthday 

2023-2024 Micro Mentor Texts Teachers as Leaders Book Study