Using Mentor Texts to Teach Onomatopoeias!
Zip! Swoosh! Plop! Onomatopoeias Fall Into Student Writing With Ease
For the week back from winter break, I love doing figurative language review, especially with onomatopoeias! If you have been following the mentor text routine on the blog, I always start with a book talk. For onomatopoeias, I love The Wild Robot by Peter Brown because there are so many great examples, and the mentor text example sentences involve the island animals as well. Kids love sounds. Kids love animals. Not only does this lesson provide an easy frame for students to follow, the book naturally pulls kids in with interest and content. This post outlines a quick lesson you can do with your students to use mentor texts and have some fun teaching onomatopoeias.
Mentor Text Posts to Read
Need to start somewhere? These three posts are great starting points for learning how to incorporate mentor texts into your classroom.
Lesson Sequence
Start with a book talk. I book talk The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. I show the book trailer. I walk around and show the pictures inside the book.
We write the examples together after watching a short clip on onomatopoeias. I sound onomatopoeias out so it sounds like ONNO-MATO-POE-EYE-AHS. And the kids correct me. It becomes a joke when I keep saying it wrong, but I am helping them with spelling.
I show my teacher examples, and I walk students through the process of choosing an onomatopoeia and using the given frame.
Students copy the “Write Like an Author” frame down. This frame helps with dialogue tags, quotation mark placement, and commas when using dialogue as well.
Students pick an onomatopoeia. They plug it into their frame. If they want a challenge, I have them use example #4 from The Wild Robot as their frame.
We share. We make noises. We have fun.
The Book Talk/Book Trailer
Mentor Text Sentences
Students copy these sentences down into their notebook. Example #4 is there to provide a challenge for more advanced writers.
Sometimes the hardest part is knowing where to start. I want to start writing individual posts each week, so that people can follow along with my mentor text routine. It can be daunting looking at all my materials for the first time and thinking:
The answers to these questions aren’t always easy, but they are possible. We have to make time to show our kids that books have the power to unlock the world of writing in front of them. We have to dedicate space in our own lives for reading because it is one of the greatest forms of self-care. We have to reconfigure our pacing guides to use these resources because we have to prioritize what matters. Figuring out what matters to me as a teacher has always been the struggle. I know without hesitation that the use of mentor texts has changed the way I do business in my classroom. Last year was a road trip of trials and errors, but those experiences and that time spent researching mentor texts was so worth it. Now, I also wanted to share what I am doing to help lighten the load on others.