The Truth About My Unbelievable Summer: A Mentor Text Lesson

The Power of a Mentor Text Lesson

With just one good book, I can weave a magical tale that allows me to teach reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar skills, and author craft moves plus a whole host of other content areas related to whatever subject I’m reading about. Not to mention all the social-emotional learning and empathy-building that comes from getting a glimpse inside a character’s head as they navigate some tricky situation in life. 

Yeah, I really love books. 

Last year, I had a student gaze thoughtfully at my classroom library, taking in all the books I’d squirreled away and stashed in all sorts of nooks and crannies. “You know,” she said. “You only need 1,000 books to be classified as a bonafide library.” And she should know since her mom was a librarian for our city library. 

The year before that, my students determined that if I sold all the biographies in my collection, I could probably pay off my new car. A bit of an exaggeration maybe, but they probably weren’t too far off on their math. 

Anyway . . . I’ve got a great book to share with you all today. It’s called, “The Truth About My Unbelievable Summer,” by Davide Cali.

The Plot

The story itself is pretty simple and appropriate for all grade levels. It goes like this. A teacher asks her student (as they are bound to do at the beginning of every school year) what he did over the summer.

What follows is an unbelievable tale of the globe-trotting adventure he had when he found a message in a bottle while at the beach. Inside was a treasure map, which was subsequently stolen by a mischievous magpie. 

It’s the kind of story that draws kids in thanks to the outlandish events that just keep escalating. Check out this read-aloud video.

Play

Conduct Multiple Read Throughs of Your Mentor Text

The first time I read this book with my students, we may just read it as a time-filler, enjoying the plot and that’s it. But later in the day or week, we’ll return to the book. Each time we read, I’ll point out something new, drawing their attention to various author moves or grammar skills that I want my students to analyze and practice so they can implement those moves on their own. 

After multiple read-throughs and mini-writing lessons, if time allows, we’ll engage in a fun writing project. Preferably one that is short and fast-paced. I’ve found that your students will take as long as you give them to accomplish a task, and it still won’t be enough time. 

So instead of allowing your students to drag out a project until everyone is miserable and your sanity is hanging on by a thread that’s threatening to break, keep the assignments short. 

For this particular book, I’d recommend reading it at the very beginning of the year. Then task students with writing their own tall tale to share about their own unbelievable summer. 

Ways to Use This Mentor Text to Teach & Improve Writing Skills

What I really love is that there isn’t a ton of text to read. Each page features just 1 or 2 sentences of the story, which follows a basic cause and effect pattern. This simple text pattern allows me to teach my 4th and 5th graders to identify different ways to transition to a new event. No more “and then’s” for us! 

Beyond the text structure, we can also dive into fantasy versus reality and how this book subverts expectations. 

Plus we can compare and contrast the level of details included in the text versus the illustrations. Later, this will lead straight into a fun writing project. Keep reading to find out how!

Ways to Teach Grammar Concepts Through This Mentor Text

Now, If you’ve read any of my past blog posts, you already know how much I’ve come to love grammar. If your mentor text includes a written text, then it can be used to teach any number of grammar concepts. 

This particular book includes multiple examples of the introductory element comma. Such as . . . 

•  Well,
• Luckily, 
• Actually,
• Apparently, 

The text of the book also uses adjectives placed right before the noun. It might not seem like a tricky concept, but for some inexplicable reason, my students often come to me with zero concept of this. 

Take the following sentence from the text:

Apparently, the crew didn’t appreciate unexpected guests. 

Now if my students were doing the writing, they might have written this sentence as follows:

The crew didn’t like guests. The guests were unexpected. 

Student writing is often clunky and wordy. They take 2-4 sentences when they could have combined details into one great sentence. 

This is a skill I can really dig into while reading, or rereading, this book. We can identify all the different examples of adjectives, then practice writing our own sentences to include adjectives before the nouns. 

When I teach a grammar skill like this, I’m giving the kids a model to learn from, time to analyze and  play with sentence building, then writing time to implement the skill independently. By teaching this grammar skill, I am helping kids hone both their writing and storytelling skills as well.

Extending the Learning

After I’ve mined all the jewels out of the book, I have a choice to make. Do I move on to another mentor text? Or do I want to extend the learning activities? What kind of writing task or project will I do?

For this particular mentor text, I would do the following two different writing tasks . . .

1.  Write about your own unbelievable summer
2. Revise the text of the story to include all the details (and more!) that are only included in the illustrations. 

The first writing task would be fairly simple and a short time commitment. I’d only give my students a few minutes to build their own cause and effect style story. Each event only gets one or two sentences, so the story should move along quickly. Plus, they’d use the transitions we listed on an anchor chart for support.

The second task would take much longer and can take a variety of forms. We could turn our elaborated stories into pop-up books, which takes a ton of time and work . . . or we could each take 1 or 2 pages of the book to elaborate on. We’d add setting details, sensory details, adjectives, and dialogue to further flesh out the story.

Then we could combine all the different elaborated pages together to form our own book. Or tape them into the actual book (sacrilege, I know), so that each page unfolds to show the elaborated version.

Cross Curricular Connections

After I’ve mined all the jewels out of the book, and we’ve done some writing, I have a choice to make.

Do I move on to another mentor text? Or do I want to extend the learning activities?

Now, I’m a huge fan of integrating my content areas by looking for cross-curricular connections. This particular book has a few different topics I can choose to explore.

Here’s a few ideas to get started . . .

Math: Using the treasure map as inspiration, learn about a coordinate plane.

Geography: Identify all the different setting in the book on a map and a globe.

Biographies: Learn about different inventors and their inventions

Science: Research squids.

Art: Draw your own treasure map. Or create a realistic looking, century-old message in a bottle.

Honestly, I don’t usually do all these different activities in class. Instead I compile the activities, usually videos, texts, and games, and put them into our Google Classroom to be done on independent time or at home.

Teaching Tips

1. A great mentor text is one that you return to over and over again throughout the year. Each time you read your favorite book, you’ll find something new to notice and learn from, so don’t feel like you have to spend weeks on this one text. It’s okay to move on. Maybe you’ll return to this book later on in the year, or maybe not. That’s okay.
2. When you find a book that you think you might want to use as a mentor text, it’s really helpful to make note of the lessons the book can teach. I usually jot these ideas on sticky notes, then slap them right on the book pages. This is really helpful when the book you’re using is a picture book and doesn’t include page numbers.
3. Pay attention to your students and which texts they really enjoyed reading or listening to. Return to their favorite books throughout the year to remind your students of the different lessons they’ve learned from their favorite books.
4. Keep your favorite mentor texts close by so you and your students can grab them whenever you need them. Sometimes the kids just need a visual reminder of how to do something. The more we can get our students to think critically and learn on their own the better. Forgot how to punctuate dialogue? Go grab your favorite novel, then imitate how that author punctuated their dialogue. Teaching kids to be self-reliant in this way is a huge plus.

Recap

Let’s recap. The book, The Truth About My Unbelievable Summer, is pretty freaking amazing, right? Simple but amazing.

This mentor text is great for teaching students how to . . .

•  use a cause and effect text structure
• transition from event to event WITHOUT always using and, then, or and then
• include adjectives before the nouns
• how to punctuate a sentence that uses an introductory element

It’s the perfect way to start off the school year and is a twist on the age-old (aka BOR-ING) “What I did over summer break” personal narrative. While you may not learn about your students’ actual summer vacations, you’ll glean far more about their personality, creativity, work habits, analysis skills, grammar skills, and writing skills.

And it takes the pressure off the kids who are too shy to share personal details or who don’t feel like their summer vacay measures up for a myriad of reasons. Instead, students get to write about the fantastical summer break of their dreams (or nightmares), which is way more fun in the long run.