Touchstone Texts

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Touchstone Texts

• With a room full of authors to help us teach,
  teaching writing doesnt have to be so lonely
• Katie Wood Ray, p.150, What You Know By Heart

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Have you ever said to a student

• Go back and add more details
• What happened?
• Details alone do not improve the quality of
  writing. In fact, they can detract from the
  quality. (Parsons, 2005)

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Requirements

• You have read the text and you love it.
• You and your students have talked about the text
  a lot as readers first.
• You find many things to teach in the text.
• You can imagine talking about the text for a very
  long time.
• Your entire class can have access to the text.
• Your students can read the text independently or
  with some support.
• The text is a little more sophisticated than the
  writing of your best students.
• The text is written by a writer you trust.
• The text is a good example of writing of a
  particular kind.
• The text is of the genre that we are studying.
• You have read the text and loved it.

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Qualities of a text A quick brainstorm of
Childrens Literature!

• Genre
• Text Structure
• Craft Possibilities
• Convention Possibilities
• Units of Study which the text may work with

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• Read a Potential Touchstone Text

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My Grandmothers Hair

• Genre Memoir
• Text Structure Vignette
• Craft Possibilities Repeated phrases, vivid
  verbs, slows down time, similes, varying
  sentences, metaphors, sensory details
• Convention Possibilities comma in a series,
  conjunctions, hyphens,
• Units of Study Launching, Small Moments, Memoir,
  Revision

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Using My Grandmothers Hair

• The teacher is no longer saying Add details to
  your writing
• Now I can say

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Terminology! Which is which?

• Touchstone Text
• A text used with the whole class as a model of
  many aspects in writing, books you return to
  again and again throughout the year
• Mentor Texts
• A core set of books which model good writing in
  a particular genre using a particular structure,
  specific to the unit, and possibly specific to a
  student (differentiation)