I KNOW it’s hard to keep students’ learning stamina going this time of year.
Here’s a tip: Use fun mentor texts to keep them excited about the season WHILE learning! Use fun read-alouds for your reading, writing, and language activities, like these two mentor texts by Stephen Krensky that go with today’s freebie:
The book links in this post are affiliate links. It doesn’t cost you anything extra to purchase using my links, and Amazon gives me a few cents per purchase which I use to fund awesome giveaways for teachers!
Both books are excellent for reviewing cause and effect! Not only can you work on identifying causes and effects within the text, but it’s also helpful to work on creating complete sentences containing both the cause and effect.
If you share the cause first, use the word “so” to connect it to the effect.
“Santa tasted and sampled the food, so he gained a lot of weight.”
If you share the effect first, use the word “because” to connect it to the cause.
“Santa lost the contest because he took time to carefully read each letter and match kids to gifts.”
You can also “flip” the clauses, putting the dependent clause first!
“Because Santa took time to carefully read each letter and match kids to gifts, he lost the contest.”
Tap below to get these cause-and-effect activities for free!
Stephen Krensky used a variety of sentence types, as we would want our students to do, so using mentor sentences to demonstrate sentence variety is a great teaching tool! I have a free BONUS mentor sentence lesson for How Santa Got His Job, which focuses on compound sentences.
You can also point out the differences from other sentences in the text that use compound subjects and compound predicates, and identify those as simple sentences compared to compound sentences also found in the text.
The activity you see above (plus so much more!) is a part of my larger “Santas Jobs” mentor text unit. Just as I have on previous days, I’m offering a discount on the full unit if you want the whole thing!
Activities in this unit:
🎅refer to details in How Santa Got His Job to list skills Santa needed for his jobs, as well as the things he did that made him lose his jobs
🎅make a list of skills an elf needs to do his job
🎅identify cause and effect in BOTH stories
🎅identify compound subjects, predicates, and sentences
🎅recount stories on a story map
🎅compare and contrast Santa to the Deliverator in How Santa Lost His Job
🎅write about what skills a substitute Santa would need
🎅add quotation marks to dialogue and recognize synonyms for “said”
