Mentor Text Monday

One of the blogs I follow:  Two Reflective Teachers participates in a weekly- What are you Reading? blog on Mondays.  The bloggers review any of their current books and include teaching points that will fit with the book.  Here are two other sites that also included many great mentor text ideas:  Teach Mentor Texts  &  Unleashing Readers- Helping Navigate the World of Books.

I will try a spin off the idea include some great books for Mentor Texts on Monday and call it Mentor Text Monday!



So here is my first Mentor Text Monday Feature:

Saturdays and Teacakes 

by Lester Laminack

Summary: The narrator reminisces about his boyhood Saturdays in the South when he would bike to his Mammaw's house to spend the day helping out and building special memories like baking and eating teacakes together. 

Narrative Craft Lessons:

• Alliteration- examples: a fitful of flour, sputtered and spit, and mixed and mashed and mixed and mashed
• Descriptive Language- Creates Language imagery and captures tiny details:Every Saturday she spread a cloth over the red countertop and scattered a fitful of flour across it.  Sending a cloud into the air.
• Effective Ending- As the young boy pedals away from her house: Don't worry, Mammaw. I won't every forget.  
• Metaphor- Some examples how Lester used metaphor: Morning's dew turns into gems, as in the dew-pearls were gone; gravel sprayed into a garden becomes a shower of tiny pebbles.
• Onomatopoeia- use of many sounds
• Print Features- italics is used for dialogue and onomatopoeic words
• Punctuation- Ellipses slow down a moment, as in One. . . Two . . . three. . .; insert an aside, such as In our little town everyone knew everybody. . . and told everything to anyone who would listen; and add clarification, as in an pull that shell apart over the bowl. . . like this.
• Simile- Many examples: sunlight poured through he windows like a waterfall; I gobles mine down like a hungry dog. 
• Verb and Verb Forms- interesting verbs include: coasted, sputtered, trudged, and flopped
• Voice- Lester wrote the dialogue with the southern voice coming though.  For example: I 'spect we need a bit more sugar; I recon we can call that half and egg; You better wait buddy. They  gonna be mighty hot just yet.
• Wordplay- Lester creates unique words that describe his memories, such as dew-wet grass or flour-dusted.

I have a copy of this book, if you are interested in using it in your class, let me know and you can borrow it or we could do some lesson development together. 

Thanks,

Rhoda