Mentor Texts for the Upper Grades with a Cooking Theme

Do you hear the dinner bell ringing?  Can you picture the table being set and ready for you?  Do you smell the aroma of fresh grown flowers as the center piece?  Well, you are in the right place then because dinner is served!  The main course today features goodies for the 4th and 5th grade teacher as well as something special for the writing enthusiast that may be stretched higher or lower to meet your students' needs.

Writing with the Six Traits

Writing in my classroom focuses on the Six Traits of Writing  (voice, word choice, ideas, sentence fluency, organization, and writing conventions), and the way I model these traits is through the use of mentor texts. As I plan my writing assignment, I pair it with mentor texts that will stimulate the ideas, organization, vocabulary, and format that will lead to better papers in the end.  As we know, reading and writing go hand and hand.  If you are having students write to explain how to do something, then sharing how-to books helps students grasp the format and type of language they need to use to clearly explain the steps.  Read alouds also may help students who may lack the descriptive language required to explain more vividly.  Here are a few books I have used with food related themes, but the list is quite long on Amazon.  By just scanning through classroom libraries, teachers are sure to find a large stack that ties to the theme of cooking.

Picture Books with a Cooking Theme

Once you've chosen a few books, perhaps this set will help guide your students through discussion and comprehension followed by the paired writing task.  This reading and writing set can be used with any book and is just $1.50 in my store.

Here are two other products from Teachers Pay Teachers that you might use as well.  Both were nicely done and are in my files. :-)  

Students need to be able to read procedural texts and write how-to pieces. Cooking is a great way to work on both skills. I hope you found these ideas helpful. Thanks so much for stopping in.

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