This article presents a way to use award‐winning books as mentor texts for very young writers. Books were selected as mentor texts from the winners of the Australian Early Childhood Children's Book of the Year Award and the American Theodor Seuss Geisel Award. The authors explain the value of using award‐winning texts in the classroom and describe the respective processes by which the award‐winning books are chosen. Sections of exemplary texts are highlighted to demonstrate how they can be used to show young writers examples of circular text structure, descriptive language, print manipulation, punctuation, and dialogue.