I have been working a lot with mentor text writing this year to raise the sophistication of my student's writing. I wanted to get away from the basic first, next, then, finally and teach the students to write with voice and flair. One night when I was reading the book, Knuffle Bunny Too, to my son I noticed how great the opening, transitions, and closing were in the story. I've always loved Mo Willems' quirky style and his books have been a favorite in my house and classroom. As I thought about it I decided to plan a narrative writing unit around this book. It was a HUGE success. The kids loved it, and the writing improvement I saw was amazing. I organized it as a sentence by sentence unit so we could really focus on editing. I loved how this unit worked, and it was perfect for first grade. Check out how I used the mentor sentence approach and gradual release to teach narrative writing:
