Easy Ways to Teach Perspective with Mentor Texts

Mentor texts are great for helping our students better understand reading and writing. I use mentor texts quite a bit to teach my students new comprehension skills, and teaching perspective has several great texts to help children see how this important skill works in every day life. Virginia Readers' Choice picture book Alfie: (The Turtle That Disappeared) is the perfect book for helping students see that there are two sides to every story.

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I love when my Reading Crew friends and I get together to showcase some of our favorite books and lessons. This gives us all an opportunity to share our wealth of knowledge with each other and all of you.

Thyra Heder tells both sides of Alfie's story in her book Aflie: (The Turtle That Disappeared). She starts by telling Nia's story of getting Alfie the turtle on her sixth birthday. She loves Alfie, but he shows no emotion to her. She gets bored with him, just as many children do with a new pet or even toy.

Then Heder tells Alfie's story. She tells how Alfie absolutely adores Nia and must get her a birthday gift for her 7th birthday. He then tells the reader all about his adventure, which takes much longer than expected.

What I love about this book is that it tells both sides of one story. So many times our students forget that every story has more than one perspective, and we get to see that in this awesome book. Both Nia and Alfie felt different ways, yet they both told the same story in their own ways. And this is an important lesson for our students to learn. Sometimes we never know how the other person really feels, and that can change the story and our feelings tremendously. Alfie and Nia teach the reader this important lesson.

To help students better understand this lesson, I created a mini unit to go with the book Alfie:  (The Turtle That Disappeared). In this unit, there are two different writing assignments. Students can tell Nia's side of the story during Alfie's absence or write a story from their own pet's perspective.

It also includes a prediction/summarizing activity, along with a sequencing activity. Students can focus on comprehension and writing skills with this simple to use mini unit.

You can grab this freebie by clicking here or on the picture below.

And don't forget to visit all of the other websites to grab some great lesson ideas and freebies!

You can also find out more about the Virginia Readers' Choice picture books in this post on Virginia is for Teachers.

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