Before I begin any large writing unit, I always get my students reading quality mentor texts. It wasn’t until a few years ago, however, that I introduced the concept of ‘reading like a writer’ to my students. Here is my ‘why’, and the struggle that I experienced that brought me to this new strategy…

I knew I wanted my students to read a mentor text before they began writing, but I found that my students were not making the connections I wished to make when they began to write their own work. They would read this quality excerpt from Maya Angelou’s memoir, for example, but not apply those same strategies to their own writing. I would still get those memoirs that were a basic recall of events, not the engaging story, as modeled in the mentor texts. There was a large disconnect, for a vast majority of my students, between the mentor texts and their own writing. I knew I would need to step up my scaffolding game, so to speak, if I hoped to build a bridge between these mentor texts and their own writing.