[Mentor Text Monday] I Heart Wired Magazine

Those of you that talk to me on any kind of a regular basis know about my love for Wired Magazine. I love every issue that comes out, and I thank my engineer friend for getting me a subscription. It's online as well,  but I truly enjoy the hard copy each month. Of course it isn't a perfect magazine (what??? impossible!), but I'm accepting of a periodical's growth areas.

I have narrowed down my Wired love-fest to four Mentor-Text-Monday-worthy reasons: Titles, Academic Language, Whole Text Structure and Text Complexity.

Titles

The article titles themselves serve as mentor texts for writing headers, titles, and punctuation for effect. Check out these intriguing titles:

See How Cadbury Hatches 350 Million Goo-Filled Eggs a Year

Are Touch Screens Melting Your Kids Brain?

Ridiculous New UFO Poll Reveals … Nothing Important

This Ex-Astronaut is Stalking Asteroids to Save Civilization

How to Make Fake Brains and Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Academic Language

Wired Magazine does not shy away from academic language. Using a super-cool tool called WordSift (thank you Kenji Hakuta and Greg Wientjes of Stanford University and the SDAWP Fellow that shared this with me), I was able to sift through the text for various kinds of academic lanaguge.

Whole Text Strucutres

There are also some fascinating mentors for whole text structures:

Bird flipbooks made from old clocks and bike parts

A photo study on the earth's relationship with water

Chased by a Zombie
A Physics problem using zombies. Need I say more?

Text Conmplexity

The text in Wired Magazine is of a high level. I took one text--the body of a short article accompanying a graphic--and ran it through some text analyzers. This text, Science Graphic of the Week: 5.3 Million Years of Sea Level Change on One Cliff Face, was especially high. There is a variety, but expect to find texts that push the limits for your students.

So there you have it. four excellent reasons to go online and spend some time reading Wired Magazine articles. You'll learn at leas tone interesting thing, I promise!

Linking up to Mentor Text Monday on SDAWP Voices.