Need a quick and easy way to cover several grammar standards at once? Mentor sentences are the way! While not quite a magic bullet, they are about as close as we get in the classroom. Mentor sentences give students exposure to a variety of sentence types and a low key grammar lesson. Students will break down the sentences, analyze their parts, and build new sentences out of those parts.
Choosing a Mentor Sentence
When choosing a sentence for a Mentor Sentences lesson, the teacher needs to focus on a few key skills. However, every sentence covers multiple skills so sometimes the “key skill” is simply a sentence that the students will enjoy.
Text Specific – Island of the Blue Dolphins
I like to use sentences from a class novel as Mentor Sentences. I find it’s great modeling – students then start to look for sentences to use as future Mentor Sentences! What better buy in is there?!
One commonly read novel is Island of the Blue Dolphins. I created this product with sentences from that book. I also left the sentences editable, so if you and your students find other sentences to use they are easily replaceable!
Notice and Wonder
Notice and Wonder are my favorite parts of the class discussion. In the beginning this is slow, but I find that with consistent encouragement students learn quickly that there are no wrong answers. Stimulating this curiosity is the key to powerful understanding, learning, and most importantly – excitement about grammar.
Break it Down
After going through the Notice and Wonder, students break apart the sentence into its components. Use your judgement here – do students need practice with just the basic parts of speech? Have you taught simple, compound, and complex sentences? Did your students notice any figurative language? Using the grammar tiles included in the product, this is a wonderful time to provide a micro lesson on a new topic. Through this micro lesson students gain a familiarity with grammar concepts without feeling overwhelmed.
Build it Up
Once the Mentor Sentence has been sufficiently analyzed and broken down, it is time for students to build their own. You can have students brainstorm ways they would improve the given sentence. This demonstrates for students that even for professional writers, revisions are always possible! The final step is for students to write their own sentence, using the newly learned and practiced components. By doing this students gain ownership and understanding, and hopefully use these skills in their own writing!
Though my Mentor Sentences project is digital, I use it in a variety of ways in my classroom. Sometimes I do the whole thing teacher led with students, sometimes entirely digital with students in small groups, and if I have time I convert it to a Pear Deck for interactivity.
Any way you do Mentor Sentences will add power and excitement to your grammar instruction!
