Shubitz - Craft moves: lesson sets for teaching writing with mentor texts

Stenhouse Publishers
www.stenhouse.com

Copyright 2016 by Stacey Shubitz

All rights reserved. This e-book is intended for individual use only. You can print a copy for your own personal use and you can access this e-book on multiple personal devices (i.e. computer, e-reader, smartphone). You may not reproduce digital copies to share with others, post a digital copy on a server or a website, make photocopies for others, or transmit in any form by any other means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and students for permission to reproduce borrowed material. We regret any oversights that may have occurred and will be pleased to rectify them in subsequent reprints of the work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shubitz, Stacey, 1977 author.

Title: Craft moves : lesson sets for teaching writing with mentor texts / Stacey Shubitz.

Description: Portland, Me. : Stenhouse Publishers, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048630 | ISBN 9781625310224 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Language arts (Elementary) | Composition (Language arts)Study and teaching (Elementary) | Childrens literatureStudy and teaching (Elementary) | English languageComposition and exercisesStudy and teaching (Elementary) | Picture books.

Classification: LCC LB1576 .S4145 2016 | DDC 372.62/3dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048630

Cover design, interior design, and typesetting by Martha Drury

Cover photograph by Daniel Shanken; author photograph by Ashley Gillman of Ashley Elizabeth Photography

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Marc Schaefer, who fills my life with love and is always ready for a good story. I could not ask for more.

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Stacey Shubitz is a passionate learner. The need for insight and to understand inform her teaching, whether she is conferring with fifth-grade writers, coaching writing teachers, or leading a graduate class. It is no surprise to see her take ideas planted during a 2008 summer writing institute at Teachers College, nurture them with further professional reading, and cultivate them into rich and mature classroom practice.

Stacey is a thinker, a reflective practitioner who works with ideas and refines practice until it blossoms. As one member of the team behind the popular blog Two Writing Teachers, she is a consummate professional who shares her insights, new thinking, wonderings, and questions with other educators. Her writing voice is clear, unembellished, and offers practical classroom talk that makes her posts both appreciated and immediately practical.

Youll find that same voice here. In Craft Moves, Stacey talks to you as if you are sitting with her in a coffee shop after school. Shell chat a bit and give you just enough of the backstory to let you know who she is and how she has come to embrace this thinking and engage in these practices. She honors the voices who have helped her refine her own teaching, and then she leads you through her new thinking. She will stretch your understandings a bit and offer her signature practical suggestions that have the potential to lift both your teaching and your students writing.

If you are reading this, it is safe to assume that you are familiar with mentor texts, craft moves, and the notion of reading like a writer. Youve likely read books like Wondrous Words by Katie Wood Ray (1998), Craft Lessons by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi (1998, 2007), Nonfiction Craft Lessons by JoAnn Portalupi and Ralph Fletcher (2001), Mentor Texts by Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli (2007), The Writing Thief by Ruth Culham (2014), and my own Cracking Open the Authors Craft (2007). If you are reading this, it is safe to assume that you understand how picture books, poems, essays, information books, all-about books, novels, newspapers, op-ed articles, and basically anything in print can be studied closelyusing a lens for How and why did they do that?to extend your repertoire of craft moves.

So you may be asking yourself, Why would I need to read another book on mentor texts and craft moves? Heres why. Through her study of professional literature, her continued practice in the field, her work with teachers, and her own graduate studies, Stacey has pushed her thinking and deepened her understanding of what it means to work with mentor texts in our classrooms. She has delved into the idea that one book holds great potential for deep work. Stacey notes that Lucy Calkins planted this idea in her thinking during a summer institute at Teachers College in 2008. As a result, Stacey made it her mission to know a small collection of books intimately. She worked to discover how she and her students could return to the same book again and again for various purposes in mini-lessons, conferring, and small-group work. Though she cautions us to avoid over-studying a book to the point that we extract the joy from reading like a writer, she demonstrates how a single book can become a treasured resource for many insights.

Working with a small set of books and coming to know them deeply leads to understandings that help you look at every other text with a new lens. Stacey began to notice that certain craft moves held more power to lift her students writing. Being the passionate learner she is, Stacey delved into a study of picture books with attention to what she has come to call power craft moves. She offers no apologies for a devoted focus on picture books: I believe picture books should be used as writing mentors in the upper elementary grades just as much as theyre used in the primary grades, because many include sophisticated language, structures, and plot lines while providing the visual supports some upper elementary school students still need. Through this focused work, Stacey says, Ive come up with ten power craft moves for fiction and ten for nonfiction books, based on the things I hope to see in my students writing, to help me determine what I can teach young writers from picture books... craft moves we want all young writers to have in their writers toolbox.

As she leads us through the idea of using mentor texts to help young writers explore and own these craft moves, she points out that any book she uses as a mentor text must have at least six of the ten power craft moves in it. Those books that stand up to Staceys criteria are integrated into the classroom through read-aloud and are available to students. Students come to think of the authors of these mentor texts as their writing colleagues. Stacey notes, Their books inspire us, their personal stories and struggles resonate with us, and they show us new ways of understanding. We welcome authors we trust into our classrooms to help us teach our students new strategies to help them become better writers. If you are less familiar with picture books or dont yet feel confident about selecting mentor texts, Stacey offers a set of questions to consider as you launch your search for mentors in your classroom.

Stacey offers sage advice and supports her suggestions and assertions with professional literature. If you are less skilled with managing a writing workshop, you will find her sitting beside you, listening and speaking to your concerns. She offers multiple suggestions for organization, developing structures and routines, and managing small-group work and conferring, but the heartbeat of this work is found in her thinking about power craft moves. , which make up the majority of the text, are devoted to lifting out and making visible the insights Stacey has gleaned about the potential that can be found in a single well-chosen, deeply studied book. When you reach the final page of Staceys book, your mind will be bubbling with new insights and you will be itching to go to your bookshelf and sit for hours with a small stack of your most well-loved picture books.