Mentor Sentences
Teaching Grammar with a Purpose
Why use Mentor Sentences?
- Integrates daily reading and writing
- Improves writing, mechanics, and grammar skills
- Promotes a fun, quick, and purposeful daily routine
- Flexible to fit teacher needs
Materials Needed:
- Interactive Notebook
- Sentence from a text. You can print the sentence on strips or students can write it in their interactive notebook.
- Teacher-created key (optional-see picture for example)
- Assessment (optional)
How to:
Find a sentence from your text that you are reading (or have read) and use it as an example of whatever skill you want them to focus on that week.
Having students see correct sentences rather than mistakes will guide them to imitating the correct sentences.
Weekly Mentor Sentence Structure
Day 1: Invitation to Notice---
Students notice things about the sentence and discuss through turn and talk and whole group discussion.
Students notice things about the sentence and discuss through turn and talk and whole group discussion.
Day 2: Invitation to Notice Parts of Speech and Label---
Students label parts of speech using a teacher created key. The teacher guides students.
Day 3: Invitation to Revise---
Students add to or change the mentor sentence to make it better.
Day 4: Invitation to Imitate---
Students write their own sentence using the mentor sentence as their guide.
Day 5: Assessment–
Students take a teacher created quiz over grammar skills discussed in the mentor sentences and/or previous skills taught.
Day 1 & 2 Example:
From "The School Play" by Gary Soto---
In the school play at the end of his sixth-grade year, all Robert Suarez had to remember to say was, "Nothing's wrong. I can see," to a pioneer woman, who was really Belinda Lopez.
In the school play at the end of his sixth-grade year, all Robert Suarez had to remember to say was, "Nothing's wrong. I can see," to a pioneer woman, who was really Belinda Lopez.