As I scroll through social media at the end of each summer, I see pictures of friends in beautiful places—European landmarks, families in a glee-filled heap in front of a glowing sunset on a faraway beach, and postcard-worthy views from the tops of mountains. I look at the children in these photos. They often have ice cream dripping down their chins, and heads thrown back in laughter, revealing toothless gaps in their white teeth. When these children go back to school and they are asked to write, they will have a bank of rich new memories from which to choose. The time when I… The time when we… The time when…
I think back to my own childhood and consider the images that would reflect my rich memories. These visual snapshots include a well-loved and slightly rusted swing set. The ground was bald beneath the two swings from years of feet kicking off and then dragging to slow down. When we swung high enough, the posts would come out of the ground and we would shriek a chord woven from equal parts terror and glee, and then we’d do it again.
Like the photos in my friends’ photo streams, there would also be a few pictures of ice cream dripping down my and my sibling’s and cousin’s chins. However, it would not be from a local creamery in a quaint ocean-side town, or the side of the ice cream truck whose bell beckons children like the Pied Piper. Our summer treat will be from the economy tub of vanilla—sometimes served in a flat-bottomed cake cone that was on sale that week at the local market. These simple, edible containers will make us feel special as we quickly lick our way to the bottom before the wafer-thin, Styrofoam-like cup dissolves… melt running down arms, dripping to the ground, a sweet feast for the ants. When we are finished, we will have a new bucket in which to mix mud, one of our favorite glorious pastimes.
Upon returning to school, when faced with the blank page, children whose experiences may look more like my summer snapshots than those of others in my feed may say, “I don’t have anything to write about.” When asked what they did during the summer, they may reply, “Nothing.” However, as an adult peering through a writerly lens, I know there are many moments of joy around that swing set and with that glorious new bucket—and that they are all worthy of words. I also know there are more of these moments just waiting to be written by other children hiding in the everyday corners of big cities, small towns, and all the spaces in between.
How will we find ways to honor and celebrate these everyday moments and experiences so closely linked to the identities of all of our students? How will we empower our young writers to see beauty worth writing about in the snapshots of their daily lives?
From my experience, kids don’t just see these ripe topics on their own. They need us to show them again and again—and not through our words, but through the words and work of others. Carefully chosen mentor texts can serve as a guide, a support, and an inspiration to play with a topic you might not have considered before.
Here are some of my favorite topics and mentor texts to help do this work.
Forts
I’ve never met a kid who didn’t love building a fort out of couch cushions, an old sheet, or sticks in the backyard. Kids can also write in a variety of genres about forts… narratives, how-tos, opinion pieces, perhaps about the best fort-building materials. There are narrative and nonfiction books about building forts, and this inclusive topic is generally one that sparks kids’ interest and is accessible to all.
The Beauty of Aging Things
A few of my favorite mentor texts are The Blue House by Phoebe Wahl and The Old Woman Who Named Things by Cynthia Rylant.
Quiet Moments Between People Who Care About Each Other
My Papi Has a Motorcycle by Isabel Quintero does this beautifully, and Sidewalk Flowers by JonArno Lawson is a book that I’ve shared with both kindergarten and middle school students.
Stories with Cousins
The Electric Slide and Kai by Kelly Baptist always makes me smile, and The Great Thanksgiving Escape by Mark Fearing makes me long for the kid table where my cousins were all smashed in around me.
Food Stories
Many stories center on food, and these stories also embrace identity and culture. There are too many favorites to share, but my favorite resource to find new texts is Nawal Qarooni’s Culturally Nourishing Resource List, which she generously updates and shares on social media.
As the pressure to show life through a filter or a highlight reel replete with special effects increases, the mentor text choices we make can slow things down and show children that their lives and everyday, unfiltered experiences are beautiful and worthy of words. Our classrooms can be places where we embrace the final lines of William Martin’s poem “Make the Ordinary Come Alive”: “And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.” (Click here to read the entire poem.)
