What Are Mentor Sentences?

Mentor Sentences are sentences that we can learn from an emulate in our own writing. In the classroom, mentor sentences are the best way to teach and spiral review grammar skills. 

Where Do I Find Quality Mentor Sentences?

Mentor Sentences are everywhere! Pick a sentence out of a text you are reading for the week, or better yet, a challenging sentence that students will come across in the next week or two. I also like to have students look for really well-written sentences in their personal reading. For students who need a challenge, this is a great activity. 

What Makes My Mentor Sentences Product Different?

It is 100% digital! Perfect for all learning environments and easy for the teacher to check and evaluate. In addition, this is designed to be done in small groups – I do mine in Breakout Rooms in Google Meet. 

I designed this to meet the needs of a variety of learners. My students do the first steps (the discussion part) together, then they can work together or separately to write their own sentences based on the mentor sentence. This allows those that really love working collaboratively to do so throughout the project, and those that prefer working individually can do that as well. 

How Does This Mentor Sentences Activity Work?

Mentor sentence work in my classroom follows a 3 step system: notice-analyze-create. 

Step 1: Notice

Students are first asked to be open about what they notice in the sentence. At first they typically stick to the basics, but over time their noticing delves deeper into the decisions that the author made. I love listening to them theorize why the author made those decisions!

Step 2: Identify/Analyze

In my class I guide them through this part, step by step. We look at capital letters, sentence types, punctuation – all the nitty gritty parts of the sentence. This is the powerful part of the process where the learning really takes place. If I want to work on quotation marks, I will choose a sentence with dialogue.  Students then can really dig into why the commas, periods, and quotation marks are where they are. If we are working on conjunctions, I’ll choose a sentence with a coordinating or subordinating conjunction and we will look at how those work in the sentence. I like to pick sentences with titles of books, poems, and articles in them to work on the capitalization and quotation marks usage in titles. This provides a very low anxiety threshold for introducing and practicing any grammar skill!

Parts of speech is a big focus for me, so my mentor sentence time includes an activity specific to parts of speech. I provide students the sentence on a slide with draggable tiles of the parts of speech, and they label the words in the sentence.

Step 3: Create

The last step of mentor sentences is creation. I give them the frame of the original sentence, and they create their own sentence(s) following that frame. They love to make up silly ones during the assignment, but for the days following the lesson I encourage them to use the frame in their writing and we celebrate their successes. 

The biggest benefit of my Mentor Sentences product is that it can be done in a single lesson. During this time of Distance/Hybrid Learning, time is at a premium. My product allows you to move as quickly or slowly as you want through the three steps, and fit it in as best as you can. That’s all we can do, right?

Click Here or on any image to purchase my Mentor Sentences activity.