Mentor Texts That Multitask A Less-Is-More Approach to Integrated Literacy Instruction

"Lack of time and resources; the two most common challenges educators report facing in their day-to-day teaching lives. When the literacy block becomes chopped up, we struggle to get it all done. We spend time searching for the perfect text, mentor, or tool for what we are doing here and now. ...we feel stressed and overwhelmed- never having exactly what we need or enough time to get it done. This frustration is not one-sided. With this kind of approach, both teaching and learning can become disconnected. Students also feel frenzied. From their perspective, they are always being taught "something brand new." Kids don't see the connection between learning happening from period to period, subject to subject, day to day. This spiral morphs into a tornado, sweeping up our discrete lessons and blowing away everyone's energy and motivation. This negative momentum ends here. Teachers and students will be relieved to discover that when it comes to both teaching and learning, less is more. No more compartmentalization of subjects or skills; we don't need a different mentor text for each strategy we teach. By curating and using a small set of texts - or even one text - in multiple ways, we can feel prepared for almost infinite teaching and learning opportunities. This user-friendly teaching resource will provide explicit examples of HOW to use high-quality texts time and time again - for a range of purposes and with a range of students. The book will contain many ready-to-go lessons as well as guidance and tools to help teachers create, plan, and teach their own lessons from multi-tasking texts"--