Mentor Texts: Evaluating

Evaluating is a natural way of thinking that we do all the time. Whether it is deciding if you like a shirt, what you want to eat, if that celebrity made a bad choice, what politics you support, or which TV show is perfect for you binge right now. We are constantly evaluating and judging everything around us, how else would we make decisions!

Evaluating is also an important reading strategy. While reading, good readers rate their understanding of the text to see if they need to clarify anything. Readers also should evaluate the text’s ideas, characters, and plot events. Why? Because it helps them to engage with the text and enhance their understanding of the ideas that make up the story.

For example, Goldilocks is the perfect book for evaluating. Was it ok for her to go into the Bears’ house and start eating their porridge? Deciding that as you read is an important part of internalizing the message of the text. Read more about how I teach Goldilocks here!

Engage Students in learning evaluating

I teach my students reading strategies with a concrete understanding to help them to internalize and understand the meaning. Meet Evan The Evaluator! He helps us evaluate and make judgements on the text as we read!

Evan The Evaluator is part of my Comprehension Crew instructional strategy. The Comprehension Crew is a group of characters each representing an essential reading skill. Each character has a profession, song, gesture, and prop that provide a concrete representation of the reading skill. These characters are used to model and reinforce each skill both in real life situations and in text. The character helps students to understand, remember, and intentionally apply skills as they are reading. This teaching format helps you provide intentional, concrete, and meaningful experiences with connection for your students. The reading character helps the skill COMES TO LIFE for the students and make it fun!

While Evan reads, he is consistently pausing to internalize what is happening in the story and form an opinion. Evan helps students understand how to put together the information given with their own experiences to make a judgement about the characters, events or ideas. He also helps readers to rate their understanding and enjoyment of the book. Evan provides them with the confidence for evaluating texts to enhance their understanding and experience reading.

Click on the picture above to see this resource pack. The product includes a model lesson to teach evaluating any text and an abundance of evaluating activities! Evan can start helping you teach evaluating today!

Teaching Evaluating with Mentor Texts

Check out these books on Amazon:

• The Most Magnificent Thing
• Animals Nobody Loves
• Strictly No Elephants
• I Wanna Iguana
• Voices In The Park
• Not Quite Narwhal
• The Day The Crayons Quit
• The Big Bed
• Hello My Name is Octicorn
• The Bad Seed
• The Name Jar
• Salt in His Shoes
• Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type
• The Empty Pot
• The Perfect Pet

Read more about how I teach evaluating in my classroom here!

(Amazon affiliate links were used in this blog post.)