Margin Notes

As we ask students to increase autonomy with mentor texts throughout the year, a great place to have them start is in their self-selected independent reading, looking at author bios.  Here is a great post written for Margin Notes by Chanelle Coates that outlines how to introduce author bios to students and get them thinking about how they can use these to represent themselves. By reflecting on the school year and looking at all of the representing students have done through their time with you, you will be amazed by the moves they have made as authors. In A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts, Allison Marchetti & Rebekah O’Dell start Chapter 5 “Learning About Genre” with an activity that I think can connect students back to the writing they did over the course of the school year and that allows them to read-like-writers. Students can study and create their own author bios, just like the ones they have seen in their books that they have chosen to read all year. Marchetti & O’Dell introduce the idea like this:

“Genre Study is where we put all of our reading-like-a-writer skills together. When we read like writers for genre, we read across a set of mentor texts and notice many categories of writerly moves including ideas (what writers generally write about in that genre) and also craft and structure (how they write about it). But genre study is important for another reason. When students leave their formal education, they will still encounter writing tasks they’re not quite sure how to approach… So what will they do? Gather a few examples of that kind of writing – that genre – and study them of course!” (Marchetti and O’Dell, 77).

Using this in your class:

By first studying some examples of author bios as a class, you can notice and note the moves the author’s make in their bios. Ask students to pay attention to the commonalties between the bios, especially noticing things like length, content, tone, and structure. Here are some examples!

Have students look at the bios in their own independent reading books, or from a selection of classroom library books and continue adding to things they have in common with the other examples they have seen.

Using their writer’s notebooks have students try to list things they could include in their own bios.

Let students try writing their own, using the texts they have studied as mentors.

Once students have completed their author bios, attach them to their compilations of writing from throughout the year, or post them around the room/school/anywhere you feature their writing and celebrate the group of authors you have supported in your classroom all year!