Mentor Sentences Volume 1, Unit 4: 10 Weeks of Daily Grammar, Grades 3-5

Description

Mentor Sentences Volume 1, Unit 4 isn’t tied to a season, so its 10 weeks of daily grammar can fill the gaps between seasonal books wherever your year needs them. The books, including Roller Coaster, Henry’s Freedom Box, and The Raft, cover relative pronouns and adverbs, prepositional phrases, vivid verbs, and quotation marks for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade.

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
  • An interactive notebook activity for the focus skill, in print and digital

Books and grammar skills in Unit 4:

• Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee: prepositions
• Shortcut by Donald Crews: relative pronouns
• Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter: compound sentences
• Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine: complex sentences
• Our Tree Named Steve by Alan Zweibel: prepositional phrases
• The Paperboy by Dav Pilkey: relative adverbs
• The Rough-Face Girl by Rafe Martin: adjectives
• Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting: compound subjects and predicates, I or me
• The Raft by Jim LaMarche: vivid verbs
• The Junkyard Wonders by Patricia Polacco: quotation marks

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: figurative language, descriptive words and phrases, and sentence variety they can borrow for their own writing.

Research backs up teaching grammar in context instead of in isolation. A large review of writing studies for grades 4 to 12 found that grammar taught in isolation did not improve students’ writing (Graham and Perin, 2007).

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 3-5 page walks through how they work in upper elementary.

Where this unit fits in Volume 1:

Volume 1 has four 10-week units. I put Units 1 to 3 in the order I taught them, so the skills spiral and get harder as the year goes on. Unit 4 can be used to fill gaps in between the seasonal books throughout the year. You don’t have to follow the unit order. The free Volume 1 At-A-Glance lists every book and skill in the volume so you can plan out your year.

All 40 weeks are in the Volume 1 Bundle, which has all four units.

Volume 2 and Volume 3 use different books, so teachers in different grades at the same school don’t repeat lessons.

Go further with these books:

• Vocabulary Companion to Volume 1, Unit 4: vocabulary practice with words from the same 10 books.
• Volume 1 Modifications Add-On Pack: support for students with disabilities, English learners, and students who write slowly.
• Volume 1 Better Than Basal: reading activities and writing prompts for the books in Volume 1.
• Volume 1 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 © 2013 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.