Dream Wakers

“There is power that resides in outstanding culturally diverse literature—a power that has the potential to engage students in reading and teach them about the art and craft of writing.”

—Ruth Culham

We dream of a time when all students will be confident, capable readers and writers. When we teach students to read as writers using mentor texts, we awaken that dream and make it real. Imagine the power of providing students with books that show them their faces, their culture, their lives on every page. And imagine how every classroom’s collection of mentor texts can grow by adding books that celebrate diversity.

In Dream Wakers: Mentor Texts That Celebrate Latino Culture, Ruth Culham focuses her love of children’s literature—and her decades of work developing the traits of writing—on books that celebrate Latino life and culture. She provides a wide variety of ideas to teach writing using some of the richest and most beautiful children’s books available. Dream Wakers gives you:

• An annotated list of more than 120 books with do-it-today lesson ideas for teaching the traits of writing—Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions. More than half of the books listed are bilingual or offer English and/or Spanish editions.
• Eleven original, insightful essays by renowned children’s authors of some of the featured books
• A handy reference chart that helps teachers locate books quickly by trait, genre, language, and author/publisher information.

Ruth encourages all of us to make sure students of all backgrounds have access to high-quality, culturally diverse texts and recognize the difference those texts will make in their reading lives, as well as in their perception of themselves as a thinkers, learners, and citizens.