2nd Grade Mentor Sentences, Unit 3: 10 Weeks of Daily Grammar

Description

2nd Grade Mentor Sentences, Unit 3 follows the second half of the year, with books for the 100th day, Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day, Dental Health Month, Easter, and Earth Day. Over 10 weeks of daily grammar, students work with irregular past tense verbs, proper nouns, contractions and possessives, and shades of meaning, one sentence at a time.

Each day, students spend 10 to 15 minutes with the same sentence, working with it in a new way: noticing, labeling, revising, and writing their own. You don’t need to be a grammar expert to teach it. I’ve already done the thinking for every day, right down to sample revisions and imitations, so you can open the lesson plan and go!

I chose favorite read-alouds that most school libraries already have.

How the mentor sentence routine works:

• 1
  Notice: students read the sentence and talk about what they notice. Your lesson plan lists what to look for.
• 2
  Label: students label the parts of the sentence, with the week’s focus skill front and center.
• 3
  Revise: students revise the sentence, and the lesson plan gives you a sample revision.
• 4
  Imitate: students write their own sentence in the author’s style and structure, with a sample in the lesson plan.
• 5
  Quiz: a short assessment with editing practice shows you which skills to bring back.

What’s included:

• 10 mentor sentence lessons, one for each book, and each one includes:
  • A teacher sentence page to display
  • A student sentence page to glue into notebooks
  • A lesson plan page with answers for each day of the routine
  • A quiz with editing practice and an answer key, in print and digital, with handwriting lines to support letter formation
  • A printable interactive notebook activity for the focus skill

Books and grammar skills in Unit 3:

The focus skills in this unit are regular and irregular past tense verbs, proper nouns, contractions and possessives, plural nouns, shades of meaning with adjectives, onomatopoeia, and reflexive pronouns.

• 100th Day Worries by Margery Cuyler: irregular past tense verbs
• Substitute Groundhog by Pat Miller: irregular past tense verbs
• Roses Are Pink, Your Feet Really Stink by Diane de Groat: proper nouns
• Duck for President by Doreen Cronin: proper nouns
• What If You Had Animal Teeth!? by Sandra Markle: apostrophes in contractions and possessives
• Sweet Tooth by Margie Palatini: irregular plural nouns
• Moosetache by Margie Palatini: adjectives (shades of meaning)
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett: reflexive pronouns
• The Umbrella by Jan Brett: onomatopoeia
• Michael Recycle by Ellie Bethel: past tense verbs

Why use mentor sentences for daily grammar practice?

Fix-the-sentence drills hand students a sentence full of mistakes. If they don’t already know the rule, they can’t spot the errors, and fixing someone else’s mistakes doesn’t show them what a strong sentence looks like. That’s why the practice so rarely shows up in their own writing.

Mentor sentences flip that! Each week starts with a model sentence from a published author, and students soak up the grammar by noticing it, talking about it, and trying it in a sentence of their own. They pick up craft along the way, too: strong verbs, describing words, and sentence patterns they can borrow for their own writing.

The routine stays the same every week, so students of any ability know exactly what to expect. Each week focuses on one or two skills, but students also meet new and earlier skills in every sentence, and that spiral review keeps them in front of students all year!

New to mentor sentences? My Mentor Sentences for K-2 page walks through how they work in the primary grades.

Where this unit fits:

2nd grade has four 10-week units. I put Units 1 to 3 in an order that builds in difficulty, so the skills spiral, and they follow the seasons: beginning, middle, and end of the year. Unit 4 has anytime books that can fill gaps in between the seasonal books throughout the year. You don’t have to follow the unit order. The free 2nd Grade At-A-Glance lists every book and skill so you can plan out your year.

All 40 weeks are in the 2nd Grade Bundle, which has all four units.

Mentor sentences work in every grade! Check out Kindergarten and 1st Grade Mentor Sentences and Volume 1 for grades 3-5.

Go further with these books:

• Vocabulary Companion to 2nd Grade, Unit 3: vocabulary practice with words from the same 10 books.
• 2nd Grade Modifications Add-On Pack: support for students with disabilities, English learners, and students who write slowly.
• 2nd Grade Better Than Basal: reading activities and writing prompts for the 40 2nd grade books.
• 2nd Grade Yearlong Curriculum: the mentor sentences, interactive notebook activities, modifications, vocabulary, and reading and writing activities for all 40 books, plus 5 bonus mentor text units.

This purchase is for one teacher. Please don’t share the files with other teachers. Thank you!

Copyright © 2015 Ideas By Jivey, LLC
All rights reserved by author, Jessica Ivey.
Permission to copy for single classroom use only.
Electronic distribution limited to single classroom use only.
Not for public display.