Mentor Sentence Archives - Ideas by Jivey

Integrate With The Text: Come On, Rain!

May 21, 2017

One of the most common struggles teachers face is tackling TIME. There simply isn’t enough of it to cover all the skills and standards we need to teach! One way to address this problem is to integrate as much as possible. Being able to address multiple skills and standards through one or two lessons truly helps maximize time as well as often helping the students to practice true application.

Ideas by Jivey shares multiple ways to use the mentor text, Come On, Rain! to integrate reading, writing, grammar, and science. Pick up a couple freebies and get some tips and lesson ideas, too!

In this post, I will share tips, lessons, and even free activities you can use to integrate science, reading, writing, and grammar with the book, Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse. **affiliate link- Amazon gives me a couple cents when you use this link and I use that money to help pay for my giveaways!**

First, I have to brag on the illustrations of the book. They are watercolor sensations! It’s easy to get “stuck” in the comprehension of the text as teachers and forget about the pictures… but it is important to “read” the pictures as well!

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out the BEAUTIFUL figurative language and imagery throughout the text. This is definitely a great book to use when teaching about these skills, as well as writing in prose.

You can get this free activity here!

Students can “collect” the awesome adjectives and vivid verbs from the book as you read- making a list they can refer to later for their own writing.

Then of course, focus on how to use that figurative language and those vivid verbs during mentor sentence time!

You can pick up the free mentor sentence lesson here!

If you teach about weather, this is a great mentor text to use to discuss a bit of science- yes even though it’s fiction! There are clues Karen Hesse gives in the text that show a rainstorm is coming, like the gray clouds rolling in and the wind picking up…

And if you teach about fronts and forecasting, a fun writing prompt I always did with my kids is to have them pretend to be the meteorologist on the news forecasting Tessie and Mamma’s weather! And of course, you can also discuss the drought that is occuring in the book, too.

There are some fantastic vocabulary words that the students will be able to learn and understand through context clues… and also look at the words’ parts of speech. Sometimes, words that can be verbs are also adjectives!

Talk about how you can tell these words are adjectives or verbs based on how they are used in the sentence.

This is definitely a “don’t miss” book. If you would like the print-and-go activities pictured in this post, you can get the entire mentor text unit in my TpT store!

Looking for ready-made explicit mentor text lessons for the week?

Join the club!

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Mentor Texts

Take Back Your Time With Mentor Texts

March 12, 2017

Time is precious. There is NEVER enough of it!!

But, what if there was a way you could take back some of that time? Would you take it?

I have your answer!

Before we dive in, let’s talk about what a mentor text IS and what it IS NOT.

A mentor text is a picture book (fiction or nonfiction), a chapter from a novel, an article, a song, or a poem. This text serves as a model to inspire students to practice a skill. In reading, students will watch and listen to you model a comprehension skill in order to understand how to do it on their own. In writing, students will be inspired to write similarly to the mentor text. In grammar, students will notice all of the “good” in a sentence from the text (called a mentor sentence), and then learn how to incorporate it into their own writing. There is a lot of imitation that occurs with a mentor text; students will impersonate techniques from the texts you present across the subjects.

A mentor text is not simply a read-aloud. Although mentor texts should be read for enjoyment FIRST, that is not its only purpose. It is not an entire novel either. You can absolutely model skills from a chapter book, but a mentor text should be shorter in length so that it can be referred to throughout a week (or two or three!) for different skills.

A MAGNIFICENT MENTOR TEXT can be used for several weeks for MANY skills. In reading, a magnificent mentor text will provide opportunities for a few (if not all) of the following: monitoring, summarizing, questioning, inferring, determining importance, questioning, visualizing, and synthesizing… to name a few. In writing and grammar, a magnificent mentor text will provide opportunities for students to imitate the ideas, structure, AND craft that the author presents in the text. And to top it off, a magnificent mentor text will be enjoyable to read, and one you will want to return to over and over!

And, if you REALLY want to get the most bang for your buck: grab a nonfiction, historical fiction, or science fiction book to integrate your social studies and science content! (OR even math literature!)

We know, as teachers, that using literature is an excellent way to introduce a lesson, but starting EVERY lesson with a new text makes it awfully difficult to keep those mini-lessons MINI! One of the best parts of using a mentor text is that it gives you more time to TEACH. Once you’ve read the book one time, you only need to re-read or refer to parts of it for your whole group mini-lessons. (Small group/guided reading should use books on their level!)

In reading, one way to lead your lesson is to use a graphic organizer. It will help guide their thinking, and it allows for an “I Do, We Do, You Do” lesson- start the graphic organizer with them, then they can help suggest something to add to it, and finally they can finish it on their own. Of course, then they’ll also be able to use that graphic organizer with their own book, or in guided reading, to show their thinking!

Use mentor texts for grammar through the use of mentor sentences. For 10-15 minutes each day at the start of writing time, look at a mentor sentence that was taken from the mentor text you are reading that week. Students notice all the wonderful things about it, figure out patterns in parts of speech, revise the sentence, and imitate the author in our writing- all over the course of the week. And of course, in writing, students will impersonate the ideas, structure and/or craft of a mentor text through your modeling and lessons.

Does this sound like an amazing solution, but you’re thinking, well, Jivey, you just told me WHAT to do, but you haven’t told me HOW to do it! I’ve got you covered!! Sign up below for a FREE one-week course and get all you’ll need to integrate reading, writing, and grammar! In this FREE course, you’ll receive a week of activities and lessons each day for reading, grammar, and writing; and encouragement, suggestions, tips, and reminders. I want to help you take back your time!

Select your grade level below to get comprehensive lessons just for you and your class!

You will get an outline for the week right away, with more information about the importance of using mentor texts. Then, over the course of the next week, you will receive explicit lessons, student activities, explanations, reminders, and suggestions for the next day’s ELA activities. If you’d like to complete the activities with your students over the course of that week, you can! Or, you can “save” all of the lessons and implement them another week if it doesn’t work right away for your schedule.

Lessons, activities, explanations, and support… did I mention FREE? What are you waiting for? Click on your grade level!

Or maybe you’d like to have it all done for you… looking for ready-made mentor text lessons for the week?

Join the club!

No really… there’s a club! Click below to see the options!

3-5, K-2, Mastering Mentor Sentences

Suggestions For Making Mentor Sentences STICK In Writing

February 15, 2017

Ideas by Jivey explains how to incorporate mentor sentences into your writing time to ensure that the grammar, mechanics, and style lessons you teach are sticking!

I am often asked by people who use mentor sentences, “How can I get the kids to carry these skills over into their writing?”

Remember, the idea of using mentor sentences is to move AWAY from teaching grammar in isolation. This means, don’t have a “mentor sentence time” in isolation either! Mentor sentences must be woven into the fabric of your writing time. I know that sometimes your schedule may not allow for mentor sentences to happen at the start of your writing time, but no matter when it occurs in your day, your writing time should still include what is happening in mentor sentences.

During writing, teachers must lead lessons (and/or model) about organization, ideas, content, word choice, voice, style, and conventions. That’s a LOT of components to be taught, right? Luckily, mentor sentences covers a lot of your word choice, style, and conventions lessons and modeling! And just like with anything else, the more exposure they have to these components, the more they will understand and start to actually use them! But, of course, showing them in a ten minute lesson and then “moving on” to something else in writing is NOT going to help them apply those word choice, style, and conventions lessons.

First, I would urge you to make the mentor sentence student notebook a RESOURCE and not just another notebook. You can read all about how I set up student notebooks here. If you have students draft OUTSIDE of their mentor sentence/writing resource notebooks, they can actually flip through the notebook as a resource to get ideas. (It’s difficult to flip pages in a notebook you are actually writing in, right?) This is something you will have to model and train your students to do, but after a while, you’ll find that the students use their notebook as a resource unprompted!

Let’s look at how I would schedule writing lessons to make sure mentor sentence lessons are woven in to writing time:

On Monday, you introduce the sentence and talk about what the students notice during the Mentor Sentences lesson. Because you’ve only introduced the sentence, this is the perfect day to also use the mentor text that the sentence is from to get in an organization, content, or ideas lesson to work on during writing. This lesson and text model should be referred to all week long, as well as the focus skill from your Mentor Sentence lesson (which you’ll introduce on Tuesday).

On Tuesday, students work on seeing how the parts of speech work together in the sentence. This should also be the day you focus solely on the focus skill from the mentor sentence. You can introduce (or review) the skill by using the Interactive Activity Companions that go with each mentor sentence lesson. This will be your “writing mini-lesson.” Typically, these are conventions lessons, but sometimes are word choice or style lessons (figurative language, descriptive language, etc). Have the students practice this skill in their own writing after the focus skill mini-lesson.

Wednesday can become REVISION DAY in your classroom during writing time. Practice revising with the mentor sentence, then have students revise for that same focus skill in their own writing.

But what if my students aren’t done drafting?

Friends, writing is a CONSTANT PROCESS. We must teach our students that revision (and editing, for that matter) must be done many times and over the entire writing piece, not just when they are “done.” Think back to when you had to write those dreaded papers in college (and maybe some of you are still now as you get higher degrees). How many times did you read and re-read and add and change and delete before you EVER came to that last paragraph? This is a skill our students should learn, too. In fact, just writing this blog post, I have moved paragraphs, added sentences or phrases to be more clear, and changed words several times already… and I’m not finished! 🙂

So yes, on Wednesday, no matter how long their writing piece might be, have students work on revising. You could even have students look back at older writing pieces (not just current) to look at how they could improve them.

Thursday is the students’ FAVORITE day during Mentor Sentences: Imitation Day! Students seriously love this day, so work that love for all it’s worth! After imitating the mentor sentence, have students work to use that same sentence structure in the writing piece they are working with at that time. Of course, this should not be all they do during writing that day. Aside from trying out the sentence structure in their writing, they should still be working on applying relevant skills they have already learned. (This is a great day to encourage them to “flip through” their notebook for ideas!)

On Friday, you’ll give students the assessment to see how much they understood the focus skill from the week. If desired, you can deliver another organization, content, or ideas lesson for students to work on during writing, or students can continue applying relevant skills they have already learned.

Please understand that this is a framework, or outline, to help give you an idea of how you can incorporate mentor sentences into writing, but how you deliver it all is dependent upon your style (small groups vs. whole group, conferring, etc). This is certainly not the only way to “get it all in” and “make it stick” but it is what worked for me!

Check out a video series I created to Weave Mentor Sentences into Writing!

If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!

If you are looking for guidance to pick the “just-right” bundle for your needs, click below!

For even more ideas, follow my Pinterest board!

Follow Ideas By Jivey’s board Mentor Sentences on Pinterest.

K-2, Mentor Texts

Strategies at Work: The Bear Ate Your Sandwich (K-2)

October 7, 2016

Ideas by Jivey presents a mentor text lesson on vocabulary for K-2 students with the book, The Bear Ate Your Sandwich. Free vocabulary cards and activities are provided so you can teach this in your classroom tomorrow!

I am teaming up with The Reading Crew to bring you all you need to teach some amazing mentor text lessons this fall!

Does your school participate in Read For The Record? It’s on October 27, 2016, and this year’s book is such a fun one! Even if you don’t join in with Jumpstart, you will still love to use this book with you K-2 kiddos.

The Bear Ate Your Sandwich is the story of a bear, lost in a city. He comes across many things in this “strange new forest,” and one of them is YOUR SANDWICH! But wait… was it really a bear that ate it? You’ll have to read to find out! 🙂

Click if you’d like to purchase the book using my Amazon affiliate link!

This book is full of wonderful vocabulary words that your young kiddos should learn. I have created a lesson to help you teach some of the words in the story.

Before reading the book, help students understand the words they are going to hear in the story. Display the sandwich cards with the sentence and picture clue. Talk to students about what they think the word might mean based on the context and the picture.

While reading the book, students should listen for the vocabulary words. They can snap when they hear it. Talk again about the meaning to make sure they understand the word and how it is used.

After reading the book, give students the vocabulary activity. They should shade the sandwiches with the word and definition that match the same color.

Grab the cards and activity here!

And, of course, you have to get the mentor sentence for this book, too! (Not familiar with mentor sentences? Check them out here!) It will be a great way to extend the vocabulary word, “interesting” as they use it in their own sentences.

Make sure to check out the rest of the mentor text lessons from this year below! This is The Reading Crew’s Second Annual Fall Mentor Text Hop! (Did you miss last year? Click here to see all the great fall texts from last year!)

An InLinkz Link-up

PIN FOR LATER:

3-5, Mastering Mentor Sentences, Mentor Texts

Use Enemy Pie To Maximize Your Teaching Time

September 27, 2016

Use the book Enemy Pie to teach multiple skills in multiple subjects- maximize your teaching time with one mentor text!

I absolutely LOVE getting the most bang for my buck, don’t you? Time is such a precious commodity in the classroom, so any time I can maximize that time by using a mentor text, I do! Today, I’m going to share how I use the book, Enemy Pie by Derek Munson.

You can get the book on Amazon:

This link is an affiliate link on Amazon.

OR you can play the book on Storyline Online!

There are so many wonderful things you can do with this book. I am going to share a few in this post.

All of the activities I am suggesting can be found in this mentor text pack in my TPT store!

READING

This is a great book to use to introduce the theme of friendship! There are many pieces of evidence the students can find to support this theme.
But don’t stop now! You can also teach character traits with this book. Have students describe the boy or Jeremy Ross giving evidence of their thoughts, words, and actions with you for practice, then have students describe Dad on their own!

WRITING

This next idea won’t just get in some great writing practice, but it will also be a great review of manners and how to treat each other. Students should write an opinion piece on what makes a good friend. First, discuss and brainstorm ideas as a class, then have students write to the topic.
Of course, you’ll also want to tie in good-sentence-writing and revision lessons with this prompt, which leads to the next subject…

GRAMMAR

Use a sentence from the book full of adjectives for your mentor sentence! (Not familiar with mentor sentences? Read all about them HERE!) Have students identify the adjectives and tell you why they help the reader. They should also be using adjectives when writing about what makes a good friend.

My friend Megan over at I Teach! What’s Your Superpower?

loves using mentor sentences!

You can also practice identifying subjects and predicates to make sure the students have complete sentences in their writing. We always practice first by looking at sentences from the book we are reading. I prepare sentences on sentence strips first and cut them apart between the complete subjects and complete predicates. I pass them out to the students and their first job is to decide if they have a subject or a predicate strip. Then, they will circle the simple subject(s) and underline the simple predicate(s).

Next, they will find their “match” to make a complete sentence!

As the sentences we use for mentor sentences become more difficult, this is a great way to identify compound and complex sentences, too! This is an easy activity that can be done pretty quickly during “writing time” or “grammar time” because it reinforces skills needed for both!

I hope this post gave you some good ideas on how to get the most out of your teaching time with one mentor text! You can head over and get the pack for this book in my TPT store here!

If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!

Or maybe you’d like to get ready-made mentor text lessons for the week?

Join the club!

No really… there’s a club!

3-5, Mastering Mentor Sentences

Getting Started With Mentor Sentences

August 17, 2016

Ideas by Jivey walks you through each day of the first week of mentor sentences.

Some common emails I get when people are ready to start mentor sentences, or are in the first week and feel like it’s not going like it should, go something like this:

“Help! My students aren’t able to write anything down the first week!”

“What do you do if students don’t know anything?”

I want you to think about everything else you teach through the course of your day, and every other routine you have to explain and demonstrate at the beginning of the year. How many times do you repeat yourself? How many times do you have to walk them through the same thing over and over again before they understand expectations? How many times do you not get through all your first week plans because it takes three times longer to do EVERYTHING than it should? Mentor Sentence time is no different, especially if this is the first time your students have EVER done mentor sentences (if they didn’t have it in a prior grade).

Your students are going to need a TON of modeling, prompting, and explanation the first few weeks of school, just as with any other routine. And they AREN’T going to just magically know everything. But if you start out slow and gradually build up to “grade level expectations,” students will feel more successful, and you will be helping them establish the routine necessary for the whole year. And one of the BEST parts of mentor sentences… the spiral review every week! Students who aren’t “getting it” the first few times will get it down the road after seeing it several more times.

In this post, I am going to lay out exactly what I would do the first week of school for mentor sentences with explanations and pictures, as well as video at the end. Buckle up- this is a long one!

No matter where you are in the school year, when you start mentor sentences you should all start the same way. You might have already read this post about not teaching grammar in isolation (and if not, go read it first!) where I lay out the reasons why I don’t “start the year” by explaining all the different parts of speech. Start mentor sentences as soon as you can (I suggest the first full week of school) with LOTS of modeling. Most of the learning during mentor sentence time is going to happen through discussion. Practicing having class conversations (listening and taking turns talking) is going to be essential to teach- and a great thing to implement, not just for mentor sentence time!

The first week you begin mentor sentences, you may not even want students to write in their notebook. I like to walk them through the routine by writing it all out for them to see, and not worry about whether they are copying or not.

In this demonstration blog post, I will be using lessons that are in this Do Unto Otters pack in my TPT store:

Yes, it is necessary to read the book for students to have context of the sentence. If you can, try to read it at some point before starting your lesson, but if not, you definitely want to read it before Wednesday. I encourage you to use the book for other lessons too, not just mentor sentences. Mentor texts are great for reading and writing mini-lessons, too! Many books can be found on YouTube as read alouds, and even on websites like Storyline Online!

If you want to skip over the written explanation and JUST SEE THE VIDEO, scroll to the bottom of this post!

DAY 1

On this day, you are going to teach students to look at a sentence for what makes it special/different/unique from a “normal” sentence. This is their time to notice. Because many of them aren’t used to analyzing a sentence this way, it will be important for you to prompt them a lot and even tell them what YOU notice about the sentence if they truly don’t say a single thing. Generally though, someone will always be the “talker” and anxious to speak up. 🙂 Read the sentence together, and then ask them what they notice about the sentence.

Prompts you might use:

What do you see in this sentence that looks different than other sentences?

What do you notice about this sentence that makes it a good sentence?

Does anything stand out to you in this sentence?

Students might tell you they see a capital and a period first. We want to move them away from those answers as we continue through the year, but that’s a great start for the first week! They might tell you they see an apostrophe in the contraction. This would be a great time to talk for just a minute about contractions and remind them of that skill from previous grades. You also hope they will tell you there are adjectives, or describing words. This would be the focus skill for the week. If they don’t tell you that, IT’S OK!! It’s the first week, and this will be a great time for you to model a think-aloud about what YOU notice in the sentence.

List all of the things they (and you) notice about the sentence either on a chart or in a notebook under a document camera.

Tell them this week, you will be focusing on making writing more exciting with adjectives, and if appropriate, allow them to do something during your writing time with this skill as well. This will help begin the transfer of mentor sentence time to writing time.

DAY 2

On the second day, you will want to discuss the specific parts of speech they see in the sentence. This is generally when teachers want to cry in the beginning of the year. But listen, the important thing here is to start off simple and build through the year. Yes, fourth graders should know more in a sentence than the nouns. But guess what? If they have been taught with grammar in isolation all of their school career, they are going to have a really hard time applying those “rules” to a sentence. Remember, the key is to make sure they understand WHY those words are what they are, and how they connect to other words in the sentence. (In other words, don’t label just for the sake of labeling!)

Once again, you need to model, model, model. And just because I labeled all of the words in the lesson plan for your reference doesn’t mean you need to label all of the words for the class!

Start off by asking them if they know how to name any of the words in the sentence. You can remind them of how to name them: nouns, verbs, adjectives… in my past experience, just like on day 1, you’ll usually have at least one kid who knows SOMETHING and they will speak up.

In the sentence from Do Unto Otters, the two most important things I’d make sure to talk them through are nouns and adjectives (because adjectives are the focus). If you want to label other parts, especially if students speak up and say they know that word, then do it! What I would NOT do is talk them through every other word they do not know and try to teach them what those parts of speech are. For one, you don’t have time for that in a mini-lesson. But also, you don’t want to overwhelm them. Take it slow and work your way up over the next several weeks. I promise, halfway through the year, they are going to know those parts of speech because of the consistent spiral manner of the routine.

This is also the day to do some more focused work on the skill of the week. I like to use interactive notebook activities to review and/or teach my skills.

DAY 3

On the third day, students are going to revise the mentor sentence. You will want to explain what this means- making the sentence better than it already is…making it sound better… etc.

Guess what you are going to do this day? MODEL AGAIN! 🙂

Since the focus of this week is adjectives, it will be very easy to revise for adjectives. Create a scaffolded, cloze sentence to show them how you will think through revising the sentence.

Allow them to help you think of words that could belong in the blank or to replace “good.”

Once you get into the routine after a few weeks, you will continue to show a model of a revised sentence (but not necessarily doing a think-aloud every time) so they can discuss and identify what you’ve done to revise the sentence, which gives them ideas of things they can do on their own.

DAY 4

This day will be the trickiest for them at first, but will soon become their favorite day because they get to write about whatever they want to write about! On the fourth day, students will imitate the style and structure of the sentence. This is another reason why the sentences start off “easy” at the beginning of the year. Students need to understand how to imitate a simple sentence before they can ever do it with more difficult ones. Every now and then, I get emails and feedback about the sentences being too easy in unit 1- remember, you are setting them up to be successful for the rest of the year! 🙂

I bet you’ll never guess what I’m going to tell you to do on this day…………… MODEL! 🙂

Provide students another scaffolded cloze sentence- this time with blanks replacing words. Most of them have seen mad libs before, so I like to set it up that way.

Talk through your thoughts as you decide what to write. Discuss picking a topic first, and then moving to write words in each blank. “I want to write about all of my new friends in this class, so I’m going to write classmate in the blank for my noun. Now what kind of classmate do I want? Well I’d like a helpful classmate! It’s nice to have a helpful classmate.”

Just like on day 3, once you get into the routine after a few weeks, you will continue to show a model of an imitated sentence (but not necessarily doing a think-aloud every time) so they can discuss and identify what you’ve done to imitate the sentence, which gives them ideas of things they can do on their own.

DAY 5

This is the day when you will want to have students see how they will be assessed each week. I encourage you to use the quizzes as formative assessments to see what students still need for pulling small groups or one-on-one conferencing…. BUT I am not discouraging you from using them as grades. Just be mindful of how long you have taught the skill before taking it for a grade. 🙂

I would display the quiz on the board and do it together as a class the first week.

This will help them understand what needs to be done each week. It’s also a great way to continue teaching the concept of adjectives- having them talk to you about how they know the words are adjectives!

I like to write on a chart that stays up all week long, but do what works best for your classroom style!

Here is a wonderful example of how it looks in a fourth grade classroom from Lindy Bulsterbaum’s students in San Antonio, Texas!

Want to learn even more?

Join the free training!

I hope this post has been helpful and encouraging to you- your students WILL get better with a lot of practice, MODELING 🙂 and time!If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!

If you are looking for guidance to pick the “just-right” bundle for your needs, click below!

Don’t forget to check out Jeff Anderson’s books! I adapted his ideas to make them work in my elementary classroom!

Integrate With The Text: Come On, Rain!

Looking for ready-made explicit mentor text lessons for the week?

Take Back Your Time With Mentor Texts

Or maybe you’d like to have it all done for you… looking for ready-made mentor text lessons for the week?

Suggestions For Making Mentor Sentences STICK In Writing

Check out a video series I created to Weave Mentor Sentences into Writing!

If you are looking for guidance to pick the “just-right” bundle for your needs, click below!

Strategies at Work: The Bear Ate Your Sandwich (K-2)

Grab the cards and activity here!

PIN FOR LATER:

Use Enemy Pie To Maximize Your Teaching Time

READING

WRITING

GRAMMAR

Or maybe you’d like to get ready-made mentor text lessons for the week?

Getting Started With Mentor Sentences

If you want to skip over the written explanation and JUST SEE THE VIDEO, scroll to the bottom of this post!

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4

DAY 5

Want to learn even more?

If you are looking for guidance to pick the “just-right” bundle for your needs, click below!

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