A Collection of Winter Mentor Text Lessons: Toys Meet Snow

The winter season with all it's wonder and beauty is upon us.  I am excited to be teaming up with other teachers from the Reading Crew to share some of our favorite mentor text lessons for the season. 

Mentor texts are one of the most valuable resources in my classroom because they highly engaging and can be used to teach a variety of skills.  Regardless of your curriculum needs, there is a mentor text available that your student's are guaranteed to love.

I have chosen to share with you one of my new winter favorites.  "Toys Meet Snow", written by Emily Jenkins and Paul Zelinsky, tells the story of three toys who venture out into the snow while their owner is away.

The illustrations in this book are beautiful and easy for the children to relate to.  The illustrations are full of details that kids will love exploring.  The pages of this book seem to come alive as the author creates authentic personalities for each character.  

Before we start reading, I ask my students to make a prediction based on the cover illustration.  Predict how the toys got out in the snow.  The students turn to their partner and share their prediction.

As with most mentor texts, I introduce the book to my students using an interactive read aloud model. Prior to reading the text for the first time, I plan talking points for the text where I want to stop and model strategies for my students.  While reading, I stop at each talking point to support and build upon the students' comprehension of the text.  Each talking point allows for either teacher modeling or student discussion.

With mentor texts, any text worth reading once is worth reading again.  Rereading a text helps students to develop a deeper level of understanding.  It also gives the teacher a chance to focus on a particular comprehension skill or strategy.  "Toys Meet Snow" is perfect to teach about character traits.  Each character has a distinctive personality that is easy for children to understand.  Lumpy, the stuffed animal is curious and asks questions because he wants to learn.  StingRay uses descriptive language to give poetic answers to Lumpy's questions.  Plastic is an avid reader who is able to give scientific answers to Lumpy's questions.

Want to share this adorable book with your students?  You can grab the interactive read aloud lesson and character traits lesson FREE to enjoy with your class.  These two components are part of the complete mentor text book unit for Toys Meet Snow.  The complete unit includes lesson guide for the week, interactive read aloud lesson, character trait lesson, nonfiction passage with comprehension questions, graphic organizers, vocabulary activities, mentor sentence lessons, and more.  You can check it out BELOW.

If you love mentor texts as much as I do, you will definitely want to check out this giveaway being hosted by my friends at the Reading Crew.  The winner will receive a copy of all these fabulous winter mentor texts.  In order to enter the giveaway, you will need to know my secret word which is TOYS.  That's all you need...so be sure to enter!  Good Luck!

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If you found this lesson helpful, take a second to pin it so that you have easy access to it in the future.

Thanks for stopping by!  If you are looking for other ideas to fill the winter months with great books, be sure to check out these other great books and lesson ideas.

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