Grandpa's Teeth- Mentor Text for Mystery and Strong Lead

We are here to share a great book that we use when teaching writing workshop!  Have you read this book?

If you haven't I sthrongly recommend it!  It'th a great book!  It'th got everything you need: mysthery, sthuspense, and missthing theeth!  

You get to talk like you have no teeth!  Who doesn't love that?  ;O)

The book grabs you in immediately with a strong dialogue lead- Grandpa is screaming (minus teeth) that there has been a disasther and everyone needs to come quick!  (I don't think I'm aloud to quote directly from the book, or I would- anyone know the rules on that??)

Then the book goes through Grandpa trying to find his teeth and the town trying to prove that their teeth are their own and not stolen!  The ending is the BEST but I won't give that away!  You'll never guess where the teeth end up!!

This is a GREAT example of a mystery, and has all of the elements that can be seen very easily by students.

I was going to "whip up" some organizers to go with this but then I saw that Beth Newingham has already done this, so why reinvent the wheel!!!  You can click her name to go see what she posted on the Scholastic Website.  (And if you don't know who Beth Newingham is, you are going to want to put aside a few days hours of your time to read about her and all of the wonderful things she does in her classroom!!)

Using that graphic organizer (the elements of mystery) you could have them fill out the information about Grandpa's Teeth first, so they can see how this author may have planned out the story.  Then, they can plan their own mystery using the same organizer.

We linked up with Jessica at Ideas by Jivey for:

Also, Stacia and I are planning on hosting our own linky, starting this week, about using mentor texts in our classroom.  We thought about just doing a series, but then realized that if we could all link up our mentor texts (a.k.a. books) that we like to use in our classrooms each week, then we'd have one place we could look for new ideas!!!  We are planning on creating a page on our blog with each week's linky on there so there will be easy access for anyone to find a great book with ideas on how to use it.

We will usually post the linky on Sunday, but you can link up at any point during the week.  The post can be as quick OR detailed as you'd like, depending on how you feel (or how your week is going).  We'll have more information Saturday and a post you can see, but normally the link up will go live on Sunday.  We hope that you'll link up whenever you can!!  Let us know what you think about our idea!  :O)

Sthoooo, what do you think about Grandpa'sth Teeth? ;O)

Amanda