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Along with picture books (fiction and nonfiction), some other examples of great mentor texts are articles, poems, short stories, and a chapter or section from novels.

When you teach with mentor texts: Name the craft technique or convention you're teaching. Explain its importance. Show the craft technique or convention in a mentor text, naming the author. Read aloud the passage in which the author uses that technique. Describe how the author uses the technique or convention.

How to Use a Mentor Text? Read the text and observe. Discuss what the writer did that made it SO good. Label the writing craft move (technique) for students if they don't have the words for it. ... Apply the craft move (technique) to your own writing. ... Share and reflect on how it went.

Mentor texts are written pieces that serve as an example of good writing for student writers. The texts are read for the purpose of studying the author's craft, or the way the author uses words and structures the writing. The goal is to provide students a model they could emulate in crafting their own piece.

A good mentor text will be something student writers can read (individually or as a group), identify techniques and approaches used by the writer, discuss and understand why those approaches were effective, and integrate what they learned from this process into their own writing.

Mentor texts can be almost any piece of writing including picture books, chapter books, articles, nonfiction books, magazines, and poems. The experts at the National Writing Project say, “Mentor texts are pieces of literature that you — both teacher and student — can return to and reread for many different purposes.

These published pieces provide students with a road map as they're trying to find their own voices as writers. Author Lynne Dorfman says mentor texts are designed to be “studied and imitated,” and they “help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today.”