Oral Mentor Texts : A Powerful Tool for Teaching Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening

“Class stories are valuable, free resources for integrating curriculum, aligning your teaching with standards, and meeting the needs of your particular students.” Connie Dierking and Sherra Jones

1. Write the story of a shared event from your classroom, embedding instructional moments. 
2. Share with students to tell, tell, and retell. 
3. Now combine with your lesson plan and watch a simple story become one of your best teaching tools.

That’s the power of oral mentor texts!

Oral Mentor Texts shows you this simple, effective new way to teach, reinforce, and practice skills and strategies with all your students. These teacher-created stories support a wide range of literacy goals as you:

• harness the power of oral language to enrich comprehension 
• help writers internalize narrative structures and craft elements 
• support English learners and struggling readers and writers to meet literacy standards, including speaking and listening.

Oral mentor texts are a great idea, and Connie Dierking and Sherra Jones make them easy to weave into your teaching with:

• suggestions for whole-group, small-group, and individual instruction 
• lesson ideas for teaching 34 key literacy skills 
• ways oral mentor texts can turn non-instructional time into teaching time

Read Oral Mentor Texts and give your students a story they’ll remember every time they open a book or pick up a pen.

Connie Dierking is coauthor of the Heinemann title Oral Mentor Texts. After graduating from Kansas State University with a M.S. in Special Education, Connie Dierking began collecting stories. Over the years her experience teaching grades kindergarten through third and special education ensured that her story satchel is overflowing. While her teaching experience has included teaching, coaching, professional development, and writing professional books for teachers, it is the stories that sustain her and helped lead to the idea of oral mentor texts! Connie provides workshops across Florida and the Midwest assisting teachers in integrating literacy in the primary grades. You will find her on any given day reading, writing, or conferring with students in Clearwater, Florida.

Sherra Jones is coauthor of the Heinemann title Oral Mentor Texts. Her professional passion most revolves around oral-language development. The idea for oral mentor texts arose from this passion. As a primary teacher for more than twenty years, she understands the importance of speaking and listening skills. Children that demonstrate age-appropriate receptive and expressive language are primed to be successful with literacy tasks. In an effort to scaffold emergent readers and writers, she became interested in explicitly teaching students how to tell a story. This involved turning shared experiences into oral stories that students could practice and ultimately perform. Through an inquiry process, she soon became aware of the possibilities of teaching into these oral mentor texts. Now, she dips back into these oral stories to teach both comprehension and writing.