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"Work by teenagers and adults, in a variety of mediums and genres, that can inspire your own account of this extraordinary year."

Cool idea - my son Connor has a reading and writing buddy who is in 7th grade.

Tips for teaching and studying non-fiction. Genre study

If you're a regular Times reader, you've no doubt enjoyed, and maybe even taught with, some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine's Lives column, which has run weekly for decades. But did you know that NYTimes.com also regularly features personal writing on everything from love and family to life on campus, how we relate to animals, living with disabilities and navigating anxiety? In this post we suggest several ways to inspire your students' own personal writing, using Times models as "mentor texts," and advice from our writers on everything from avoiding "zombie nouns" to writing "dangerous" college essays."

"What is your favorite food? How would you describe it? Using the sample descriptions in the article as mentor texts, compose a two or three-sentence description of your favorite food, using figurative language and unusual comparisons."

This is the site for a student-staffed writing center at Clarkstown High School in NY. It began as a teacher-staffed center, but it became too burdensome for teachers alone to help the high volume of kids, so they brought in peer tutors. Now it is almost entirely student run. Now there is at least one teacher in the center at lunch and after school, but he or she works as a mentor to the student tutors. 

"I've used the story of Rudolph as a "mentor text" ever since. At 88 words, Rudolph is shorter than the Jesus parables and the Lincoln speeches, works often praised for their brevity and high purpose. In the digital age, writers need reminders that memorable stories can be told in short forms. I now believe that there may be no more efficient example for teaching the elements of story than Rudolph. I use it to discuss the naming of characters, the telling detail, the inciting incident, the narrative arc, the story engine, the mythic archetype and the big payoff."

"Emma Tsai, an English teacher at Episcopal High School in Houston, and a writer herself, tells us how she teaches with mentor sentences from The New York Times - bite-sized nuggets of excellent writing that her students learn to identify i"

"Each entry will spotlight a Times text, then offer guided practice to help students both identify effective "writer's moves" and emulate them in their own work."

"In the second half of the year, my writing course shifts to a more focused study of argument. We read and analyze several mentor texts together as a class, starting with speeches and letters, including an in-depth analysis of the classic  "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. (this year, I also paired King's text with "The Future Needs Us" by Rebecca Solnit and the introduction from Writings on the Wall by Kareem Abdul Jabbar). But the key to teaching students how to analyze argument-particularly in today's media rich world-is to make the time and space for students to take what they have learned and apply it independently. (In fact, that's true when you teach anything.) So this year, I changed up my argument unit a bit to include a two-week workshop period in which students would: Read several arguments from a variety of media (written, visual, auditory, film); Analyze the arguments for their line of reasoning; Write their own original essay which defends, challenges, or qualifies a claim made by one (or more) of the arguments they studied."