Mentor Texts

The use of quality texts in the classroom to teaching reading and writing is critical. Selecting appropriate texts can be challenging, given the wide and ever-expanding range of children’s literature and non-fiction texts available. What counts as a mentor text depends on the maturity and reading ability of the students. They should offer exemplars of language resources used for particular purposes (or illustrations) which stretch students’ reading capabilities, as well as providing models for writing.

Please note, for the purposes of this website, PETAA has differentiated between model and mentor texts. We have typically interpreted mentor texts as published, longer texts (e.g. picture books, chapter books, information texts, etc.) and model texts as those either created by the teacher or student themselves, as exemplars, or shorter published texts, e.g. a short newspaper article, or report.