Mentor Text {Fossil}

I love wordless books and I found today's Mentor Text while searching for wordless books on Amazon.  Fossil is by Bill Thomson, the same author of Chalk.  Through the illustrations he tells a story of a boy at the beach who finds a fossil after he has tripped on a log. The pictures show how the boy discovers several fossils on the beach.

I love the illustrations in this book and think my kids would too.  Wordless books are great for students to write stories for.  They could write the entire story themselves, or assign each student a page, or a team of students a range of pages. The possibilities are endless!

I love how this page is perfect for practicing sequencing in writing!

Students can identify the types of fossils in this text, and because there are no words they actually have to use information they have learned from your fossil unit! :)

I think I would use this mentor text at the beginning and end of my fossil unit.  I would love to see how my students change and add to their original story after learning the vocabulary and fossil curriculum.

To go along with this mentor text I am giving you four Fan-N-Pick fossil cards!  These cards are a part of my Fossil Interactive Notebook.  If you have never used Fan-N-Pick in your class here are the instructions:

Step 1:  Student One holds question cards in a fan and says “Pick a card, any card!”

Step 2:  Student Two picks a card, reads the question out loud and allows five seconds of think time.

Step 3:  Student Three answers the question.  

Step 4:  Student Four responds to the answer:  

• For right or wrong answers, Student Four checks and then either praises or tutors.  
• For higher-level thinking questions which have no right or wrong answer, Student Four does not check for correctness but paraphrases and praises the thinking that went into the answer.  

Step 5: Students rotate roles one clockwise for each new round.