Literacy and Numeracy Corner

Recently our teaching teams sent home their Term 1 newsletters, which provide an overview of what is happening in each of the main curriculum areas.  You might have noticed that when describing the focus for Reading and Writing, teachers referred to the mentor texts that they plan to use. So, what is a mentor text?

A mentor text is any piece of text that provides a strong example of a reading or writing strategy that we are teaching students.  Mentor texts help students to understand the ‘moves’ that effective readers and writers make. For example, the book Possum Magic is a great mentor text for teaching students to recognise cause and effect while reading, because every time Hush eats a particular food, part of her body becomes visible again. It can also be used to model the use of alliteration in writing, because Mem Fox uses phrases such as, ‘Minties in Melbourne’ and ‘steak and salad in Sydney’. There is much time and thought that goes into choosing the perfect mentor text and here at BNW we aim to choose texts that are linked to our Inquiry Big Ideas and that represent a variety of text types such as novels, picture storybooks, films, podcasts, songs, and information texts.