If you haven’t experienced Snowfall by John Branch you must read it.
Snow Fall
When I began reading Snowfall, I thought I was just reading another online article. You know, with a picture here and there, maybe a few links, and using typical straight forward language. I had no idea that I would be glued to my screen and unable to step away from my computer for the 3 hours that it took me to read the entire piece. As a grad student, time like this isn’t likable to spending on something I don’t absolutely have to read. And yet there I sat; unable to look away from the experience created in such mastery.
I call Snow Fall an experience rather than an informational piece because it offers so much more than your typical nonfiction. This piece opened up my mind to what informational writing can be in today’s world. It doesn’t have to be the old research essay that students dread writing and I imagine most teachers feel similarly to reading them. Our students have the technology to turn their learning or their research into a work of art and often with just about the same effort it would take to write an essay.
Within Snow Fall, John Blanch and his team include 3D moving maps to show the setting of the story, narrative writing for easy reading and comprehending, audio recordings of witnesses, pictures of all of the people from the story, and so many more writing techniques that make the story exciting to read. It is the ideal mentor text for middle school and up.
When choosing mentor texts for students to read, study, and emulate, we have to consider the things that can stand in the way of their progress of writing. First of all, we need to identify mentor texts for what they are. I realized recently that I hadn’t heard of the term “mentor text” until college. I read so many stories, essays, poems, etc. throughout my schooling and yet had no idea that several of those pieces were intended to give examples of what I might do in my own writing. When choosing mentor texts for younger students, we need to consider the level of the text and the students reading level. If younger students can’t read the mentor texts we give them, we need to read them and provide more explicit instruction so that they can understand what the text is saying and how it is saying it. When choosing mentor texts for older students we have much more to consider.
Snow Fall offers the following writing devices within it: foreshadowing, simile, metaphor, narrative, nonfiction, organization, multimedia, perspective, dialogue, setting, transitions, vocabulary, pacing, description, plot, sequence, conflict, solution, tone, voice, action, structure, and I’m sure I missed several more. It is the ideal mentor text that can be used to teach several things. I could see myself returning to this piece several times in a school year while introducing these devices, with a follow up of new mentor texts of course. With mentor texts, more is better. The more we read, the more we write. And the more we write, the more we can work on individual weaknesses we have to become stronger writers.
When asking our students to read a mentor text, we can just hand them a black and white piece of paper with only words on it. But I don’t think that would serve this generation of students very well. Students have always loved to see pictures in the texts they’re reading. Some because they’re nice to look at, and some because that means there is less text on the page to read. But pictures aren’t enough anymore. This generation of students needs movement. And I don’t mean waving a pretty picture back and forth in the air. I mean quality, multi modal texts. Texts that offers links to additional text, texts that defines words students may not know, texts that scrolls through pictures, texts that offer short video clips about what’s being read, texts like Snow Fall.
We shouldn’t be giving our students texts that bore them, because why would they want to emulate pieces of that text in their own writing?
While I may not be a k-12 student, I recently was asked to write an informational piece and was directly inspired by the piece Snow Fall. I’ve returned to my own work several times just to admire the piece I created (and of course to tweak anything I catch that needs tweaking). The best part of all this, was learning that it’s really not that hard to create a multi modal piece like the one I made (which is called How to go from Newlywed to Single Again and can be found in a separate blog post on informational pieces). It’s basically one giant fill in the blank. And there are several sites available nowadays that allow people to create their own writing piece online. See below for a few that I recently explored.
Wonderopolis <– Wonderopolis has several multi modal, interactive texts that can serve as mentor texts or are great for learning about content.
Adobe Spark <– This is the site that I created my informational piece on.
Glogster <– Students can make multimedia posters.
BookCreator <– Allows anyone to create and store “books” online.
Writings about Writing 