Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer is a story about a young boy trying to figure out what poetry is, to prepare for Poetry in the park on Sunday.  He knows all the animals in the park so throughout the week he asks all of the animals what poetry is and all they respond with is a phrase or line. Towards the end of the week Daniel realizes that poetry has been right in front of him the entire time. At the end he creates a beautiful poem combining all the ideas of what poetry is, that the animals came up with. 

This story would be a perfect mentor text for introducing poetry to students. This story shows students that poetry can be anything that evokes feeling or emotion. It helps students understand what poetry really is about as well as getting to see what a fellow kid created for his poem.  

After a teacher reads this book in their classroom there could be a mini lesson of some types of poetry and more direct instruction on writing poems. Then to integrate the book into instruction, teacher may ask the students to find 6 or 7 important people in their life and ask them what poetry feels like to them. Then after all the answers are collected students will use this to create their own poem. To then  share with the class for Poetry in the classroom on Friday. This will get them excited about poetry and they will get to create a poem just like Daniel. 

Read Aloud of Daniel finds a Poem:  https://youtu.be/902OiQov2-0

Pinkalicious is a story where a young girl loves the color pink and when she eats too many pink cupcakes, she turns pink. To undo this she has to eat green vegetables to make herself  her normal color again. She then learns that she should listen to her mother and doctor when they tell her "NO MORE PINK CUPCAKES". 

This story would resemble one of the six traits of writing called voice very well. Pinkalicious definitely had a voice throughout the story. She loved the color pink and didn't want to listen to her parents or her doctor about eating to many pink sweets. She had a very strong voice until she turned the color PINK. This story resembles the voice students have when they think that their parents are wrong about something and their inner voice takes over wether or not it is something good or very bad. 

After a teacher does a read aloud with pinkalicious students can brainstorm times when they thought their voice was stronger and better than their parents or an adult. Have the students come up with ideas and then go into the instruction of what voice in a piece of writing actually is. Then students could write about a time where they thought they were right about something and how they used their voice to get that point across. They will need to reflect this in their writing. 

Who Was Dr. Seuss is apart of the series called the who was books. They are a series of books that tell you all about famous or historical figures in our world. This book tells us all about Dr. Seuss's life and how he came to be Dr. Seuss. This book would be a great mentor text for students when they are learning about writing nonfiction they can see how another person did this in a fun easy way.  

This book could be used in a classroom for a small research project. Teacher will read aloud a who was book and together the class will do an activity to find 5 important events from that persons life and then once they have completed that activity. Students will  break off into groups of two and each group will get there own who was book. Their job will be to come back to the class and share 5 fun facts about  their famous person as well as drawing a picture of them. This will help students write there own nonfiction writing and as a class we will have a whole book about all sorts of different people in our school library and each group will have one page in the book. This gets students excited that they as a class will create a real book. 

The  story Are you my Mother?  is about a baby bird who was born in his nest while his mother was away looking for food. He looked for her and he couldn't find her, so he went searching asking everybody he saw "Are you my mother". He did this until he ended up finding his mother. 

This story would resemble organization very well because throughout the whole story we knew what was happening, the plot was organized as well as the pages were simple and easy to understand. 

This story could be used in a classroom to show students how an organized story should look. This will show them that organization does not mean a boring story it just means a well thought out and planned piece of writing. After reading students could fill out a graphic organizer with their own story. The organizer will guide them to have an organized story from beginning, middle, and end. 

Ralph Tells a Story is about a young boy who struggles to write his own story, during class he does anything to not participate in writing. He walks around, staples papers for his teacher and much more. One day his friends help him write a story from his point of view about his experiences and that is when Ralph finally tells a story. 

This story helps kids understand that sometimes writing isn't easy but when you can use narrative writing to help you reflect on  your own past experiences then writing becomes easier because it is coming straight out of your brain. This would be a great mentor text for this topic because some students may be in the same boat as Ralph and now they may have hope for their writing success. 

In the classroom this would be extremely helpful to show students that narrative writing may help them with other forms of writing. Students could write a small moment story or a feeling story to show they know what a narriatve text is after reading this story.