Fantasy Mentor Text

It has just come to our attention in Virginia that the 5th graders have a chance of getting a prompt to respond to on their Writing SOL assessment that will ask them to compose a story and that story may also have fantasy elements in it.

Here's an example of one of the 14 prompts that ask for a story to be composed, with fantasy elements included:   Imagine a fish popped its head out of the water and said something. What would you do? Write a story about what happened. Be sure to include details.

To help prepare the students at my school, I am planning to teach them explicitly how to write a story by following the superb lessons in Lucy Calkins' Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5. In Book 4 called Writing Fiction: Big Dreams, Tall Ambitions students are encouraged to live like fiction writers; to collect story ideas by observing their own lives; to create characters with wants and struggles; and to use story arcs to create rising action.

While teaching this unit, I plan to immerse students in fiction reading so they will have mentor texts to learn from. But since most of the prompts for the 5th grade writing SOL also have a fantasy element involved, my school librarian found the following fiction picture books, all with some fantasy elements included.