Mentor Sentence Archives - Ideas by Jivey

Mentor Texts and Mentor Sentences

March 30, 2013

I have a ~~problem~~ slight obsession with books. I LOVE reading to my kiddos, and I love for my kiddos to WANT to get books from my class library to read. 2 years ago, I did a class library inventory and put them into an Excel spreadsheet with location (if it was on my shelf or their shelf- I still have some that are “mine”) and reading level. My intention was to add to it everytime I got new books, and I did for a while… but I haven’t kept up with it… and the thought of going through all my books again to figure out which ones aren’t in the spreadsheet makes me break out in hives. There are 977 listed on the spreadsheet, but I’ve gotten many more since then through book orders and book fairs and Amazon orders…

The books that are “mine” are the ones I use for lessons. I like to use books as mentor texts- books I can refer to for many lessons over a period of time. Sometimes, I read the book more than once, but usually, I read it once and then can just refer to a few pages later since the students are already familiar with it. This saves on time and keeps my lessons true “mini-lessons.”

I say all this because I’m linking up with Collaboration Cuties today to share how I use Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs in my classroom as a mentor text.

This is such a fun book and YES it can be used in upper grades!!

I use it for a week in Reading, Writing, and Grammar using the skills listed above. I have a unit in my TPT store you should check out if you are interested in using it, too!

One thing that is not included in the unit is how I use this book during grammar time (although there is an activity in the unit identifying parts of speech). I don’t teach grammar explicity very often. I use Jeff Anderson’s method of Mentor Sentences. (Have you ever seen him speak? Oh my gosh, he is hysterical and so full of information!!) I lift a sentence from my mentor text and I use it as an example of whatever skill I want them to focus on that week. The idea is that the students are seeing excellent sentences instead of sentences full of mistakes trying to figure out what’s wrong, which hopefully will transfer to their writing, as well. I HAVE seen my students imitate the authors in their own writing, which makes me so happy!

For this book, I chose a complex sentence (the book is full of them!) for the students to study.

“By the time they woke up in the morning, breakfast was coming down.”

On the first day with the sentence, the students try to figure out why I’ve chosen this sentence in particular. They might notice (among other things) that the sentence is in past tense, there are prepositional phrases, and hopefully, that it is a complex sentence!

We focus on the fact that it’s a complex sentence all week and they look for sentences in their own reading that has the same style, and during “grammar time,” we also work to notice parts of speech in the sentence (like adverbs: up and down; prepositions: by, in; verbs: woke, was coming; etc), we revise the sentence one day (they have to figure out how to make the sentence EVEN better- usually by adding adjectives or changing verbs), and they also try to imitate the sentence (in this case, they write their own complex sentence with the subordinating conjunction coming at the beginning of the sentence so that there is a comma separating the two clauses, and they also try to incorporate adverbs and prepositional phrases since the author did). At the end of the week, there is a quiz over what we worked on all week.

Click here or on either of the images below to download for free and try mentor sentences in your own class! The first page is so they can glue the sentence into their journals- they fill up that page over the course of the week with the work we do with that sentence.

I hope this is helpful to you! I’ve said I was going to share how I use mentor sentences in my room, and something else always comes up. I plan on doing another post this week (FOR REAL!) with a new mentor sentence showing actual student work so you can really see how it happens in my room! 🙂

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

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Revisiting Mentor Sentences!

April 4, 2013

Here is the beginning of the Mastering Mentor Sentences Series with Collaboration Cuties!

I told you about the book Dandelions last week in this post about mentor texts. As I mentioned, I use the book for reading and writing, with social studies integration, too… and I’m here to tell you I also used it for my mentor sentence to teach grammar!

Before I get into the actual sentence I used, I wanted to share with you the directions I give to my students so they know what to expect each day. We use composition notebooks for our mentor sentence journals, so I laminate these directions and tape them on the inside of the front cover of their journals. (Of course, after doing it for a few weeks consistently, they know exactly what’s coming. But they can always peek if they need to!)

Click the picture or click here to download the directions!

I chose the sentence, Mares-tail clouds waved in the sky and the grass sang around us, from the book Dandelions by Eve Bunting because we have been working on prepositional phrases as well as distinguishing between compound and complex sentences. It’s also a FABULOUS sentence for imagery.

Here is a student’s notebook from the week. I hope it helps you see what the students do each day!

To celebrate the students as writers, I choose 4 students each Thursday to display their super sentences for the class to see! Here were the sentences I chose for Dandelions:

It is hard to choose the kids each week to display their sentences because there are so many good ones! They really have blossomed as writers this year! I try to just make sure I don’t pick “those same kiddos” every week.

On Friday, they take their quiz. It focuses on all the things we have been working on all week!

Next Tuesday and Thursday, I will share more of what my chart and dialogue looks and sounds like, as well as more of what the students’ notebooks look like. Amanda and Stacia will also be posting those days in our Mastering Mentor Sentences Series on their blog! But until then, catch up with what they have already shared about mentor sentences here.

Is there anything you have questions about? Comment below and I’ll be happy to answer! 🙂

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

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Mastering Mentor Sentences, Part 1!

April 9, 2013

Happy Tuesday!! Welcome to:

If you’ve missed any of the previous posts about mentor sentences from either me or Collaboration Cuties, check them out by clicking on the tab at the top- under my header- called Mastering Mentor Sentences (after you read this post, of course!). Technically though, this is my first post in the series that we are doing together!

We first heard the idea from Jeff Anderson in his awesome professional books. We took his ideas and adapted them to make a routine that worked for elementary school. Here is what we do!

In today’s post, I am going to focus on Day 1 and Day 2 -in a normal week, those days would be Monday and Tuesday. If it’s a short week, we do both of these parts in one day.

I give the students their sentence for the week to glue down into their journals. This sentence comes from a book we read the week before, or we are going to read that week. Usually, I have not read the book when I give them the sentence, so when I do read the book, they are hanging on every word, waiting to hear the sentence. I have trained mine to snap when they hear me read the sentence (instead of shouting out). Last week, we used a sentence from one of my favorite books, Step-Stomp Stride by Andrea Davis Pinkney which I had already read to them the week before as part of our biographies unit.

Sojourner put one big-black-beautiful foot in front of the other and she STOMPED on the floorboards of ignorance that were underneath.

Once they have their sentence glued down, we practice reading the sentence together fluently. I’ll call on some volunteer students to read it by themselves to show off, but we read it a few times chorally as well. Then, they “notice” what is so awesome about this sentence. Some things I ask to prompt them and get them going are:

How is this sentence different from others you’ve seen? How is it the same? What makes it so awesome? Why do you think I chose THIS sentence out of ALL the sentences in the book? What about the way this sentence is written stands out to you?

I expect them to write at least three things down on their own, but usually they write more. I give them just a few minutes, and then we come to the floor and they share what they saw. I add their “notices” to the chart. I always have something in mind that made the sentence stand out to me, and the students know they are trying to “guess” what it was that made me pick it. This helps with their list of “notices” too because they know it’s usually not something small and simple (although, sometimes it is!). Here is our list from last week’s sentence:

I have my students tell me why for everything. They can’t just say the sentence is descriptive. They had to tell me they could imagine the scene in their head like a movie. They couldn’t just tell me STOMPED was in all capitals- they had to tell me why they thought the author put that word in all capital letters. You’ll notice the star next to “big-black-beautiful”- there were two things about that, and they got them both!! Alliteration, and the hyphens! We also talked about this being a compound sentence, but I just realized it didn’t make it on the list. I don’t know how that happened! Whoops! I am usually really good about making sure everything that they say is there! My apologies!

The students re-write the sentence in their notebook, skipping lines in between, and label all the parts of speech that they know (first, independently). Then we come to the floor again, and they tell me what parts of speech they know, but again, they have to talk about WHY. Here is the completed sentence, but check below it for examples of the dialogue we had as we labeled:

Student 1: Sojourner is a proper noun.

Ms. Ivey: How do you know that?

Student 1: Because it’s her name, and she is a person.

Ms. Ivey: Good! What else?

Student 2: Underneath is an adverb.

Ms. Ivey: Really? But it tells position. Why isn’t it a preposition? (yup, I’m mean. Trying to trick them!!)

Student 2: (thinks for a minute) Because it tells where they were, but it doesn’t connect it to a noun…? (She was not totally sure, but she was right! I was so proud!)

Ms. Ivey: Very good!!! No fooling you!! What else do you notice?

Student 3: Oh! “On the floorboards” is a prepositional phrase, because like <student 2> just said, it DOES connect to a noun. On connects to the floorboards, and it tells where!

Ms. Ivey: Very good!! You are right, and actually, our whole prepositional phrase is “on the floorboards of ignorance”- of is ANOTHER preposition! (It’s okay to tell them some things, like this, because you don’t want them to be confused…)

Student 3: So “in front of the other” is a prepositional phrase too, right?

Ms. Ivey: Yup!

You can see that, by this point, I am not having to really lead them too much. They do most of it on their own. This is a different story at the beginning of the year. Please do not believe that the conversation you just read above happens right away. They begin to understand the “language” and know how to tell me the answer as we get more comfortable with the process. Of course, I would not give them a sentence like this in the beginning of the year either- I want them to feel successful, which they can do on simpler sentences at first. Something you might hear from them early on is, “big is an adjective.” Instead of just labeling it, make sure to ask, “how do you know?” If they give you a blank stare, or just tell you it’s a describing word, make them tell you what word it’s describing! Same with nouns. Yes, at this point they had BETTER know what a noun is, but make them tell you what MAKES it a noun! (For example, it’s a person.) This is what leads to them being able to tell you why something is a preposition, for example. It also is great when you get into those adjectives that are also nouns, like “kitchen table.” They want to tell you kitchen is a noun. Well it is, by itself. But it’s describing what kind of table!

Mentor sentences give you the chance to hit several aspects of grammar repeatedly each week. I rarely teach grammar in isolation anymore because I can do it through mentor sentences! I know this was quite a long-winded post, but I’m trying to be detailed in hopes you will see the benefits of mentor sentences and want to use them yourself! I have seen my students’ understanding of grammar improve, and wait until you see how it improves their writing in Thursday’s post! 🙂

Now click here to head over to Collaboration Cuties to read how they use mentor sentences with their class! They are sharing about a sentence from one of my favorite books to read with my fourth graders: George Washington’s Socks!

CLICK HERE to read part two of this series!

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

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Mastering Mentor Sentences, Part 2: Developing Better Writers

April 11, 2013

Have you all been anxiously awaiting part 2? Hanging on the edge of your seat? 🙂 Make sure if you haven’t read Part 1 to read it before this post so this one makes sense. 🙂 And now set aside some time, because this one is a bit long… just trying to make sure I give you all the details!!

So you saw, Monday focused on style, language, structure, and some grammar, too. Tuesday was all about grammar. Wednesday and Thursday will focus on the students as writers.

The focus of day 3 is to make the sentence SOUND even better than it already does. I have an exercise I do with the kids every Wednesday (and other times in writing also, but they expect it during Mentor Sentences on Wednesday). I ask them, “what happens when we edit?” I have taught them editing makes our writing LOOK better, so they all say together, “we make it look better,” as they put their hands on their eyes like binoculars. I ask students to share ways we can edit- capitalization, punctuation, spelling… And then I ask, “what happens when we revise?” I have taught them revising makes our writing SOUND better, so they all say together, “we make it sound better,” as they cup their hands around their ears to give themselves supersonic ears! I ask students to share ways we can revise- changing verbs to make them more vivid, adding descriptive language like adjectives or figurative language, combining sentences, etc…

No laughing allowed…….. :o) And let’s NOT pin this one, OK? OK.

So, now they are ready to revise this week’s mentor sentence! We do talk about how just adding any old adjective (or adding TEN adjectives) is not revising because we want to make it sound better, not just “longer.” I always give them an example of the sentence that I revised. This helps get their brain going. It also allows conversation for what kinds of things can be done during revision. Here’s my sentence from last week:

(The original sentence was: Sojourner put one big-black-beautiful foot in front of the other and she STOMPED on the floorboards of ignorance that were underneath.)

We talk about the things that are different in the revised sentence:
*I changed the word put to placed, making it more vivid.
*I also replaced STOMPED with POUNDED- both are vivid, but POUNDED makes an impact in all capital letters, too.
*I used the preposition across instead of on because I thought it fit better with POUNDED.
*I changed the adverb underneath to below.

The students write their sentences and I allow the ones who volunteer to share; the rest of the class listens for the revisions and shares what they hear. It’s very important that you stress to them they are keeping the meaning of the sentence, but just making it sound better. Once they learn Thursday’s task, they will sometimes get confused and want to change the meaning of the sentence. Just remind them that they won’t do that until the next day…

Today’s task is to write like the author. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, I always say! So, on this day, the students decide what they want to write their sentence about (this is the day they change the meaning!) but try to keep the structure of the sentence the same. It is important to go back and review the noticings from Monday. The author used a metaphor? Oh, I should too! The sentence is a compound sentence? Then, so should mine! The author connected three alliterative adjectives with hyphens? I will, too!

Again, I share my example with them and we compare how it is the same as the mentor sentence:

I wrote a compound sentence with three alliterative adjectives connected with hyphens followed by a prepositional phrase, and capitalized my vivid verb. Sometimes, I even go word by word or phrase by phrase, pointing at the mentor sentence and pointing at mine to talk about the similarities. Then it’s their turn! They all imitate the sentence and I choose 4 students to write their sentence on sentence strips with special markers. Some weeks, it is REALLY difficult to choose only 4! The students all want to be one of the four chosen, so they really try hard to write some SUPER sentences. I also try to pick different students each week to give everyone the chance to be displayed on the bulletin board.

The four sentences I chose last week were great! You’ll notice they don’t have EVERY element from the mentor sentence, but that’s okay! You can tell they are trying some of the elements, and hey! I would be so happy with these sentences written in their writing pieces! The first one is by far my favorite. I laughed out loud!!

My dog dropped one stinky-smelly-surprise in front of me and BARKED for me to clean it up.

I bounced the basketball with my super-sweaty-super-sized hand and threw the basketball into the white netted hoop.

My mom made the best-blasting-booming with taste pasta and my brothers and I devoured it.

Jeremy bought delicious-dreamy-delicate brownies from the Debie Snack store and he STUFFED the brownies in his mouth and ate it.

Perfect sentences? No. But better than those boring ol’ sentences I’d be getting otherwise? Absolutely!! And YES! They do try to incorporate the elements and structure of mentor sentences into their own writing! I have seen improvements in my students writing over the last few years while using mentor sentences.

As I mentioned in my last post, I teach grammar through mentor sentences and through my reading and writing lessons. Very rarely do I teach it in isolation. We have been working on distinguishing between simple, compound, and complex sentences for the last several weeks. I alternated my mentor sentences between compound and complex, and we talked about how we knew it was compound vs. complex.

Every Friday, I give a mentor sentence quiz. The quiz requires them to edit the sentence that they’ve been seeing ALL week, and it assesses whatever skill we worked on as the focus for that week. It sometimes also spirals back to include skills that were previous focuses but also showed up in this sentence. For example, in this week’s sentence, I focused on the fact that it was compound (last week was complex). But we also talked about the alliteration in “big-black-beautiful” which was a previous focus in our figurative language unit and another mentor sentence… so I included it on the quiz!

FYI: this is one of my ELL students! Yippee!

Make sure to go read Amanda and Stacia’s Part 2 over at Collaboration Cuties next!! :o)

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

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Solar System and Halloween Five For Friday… and Mentor Sentence Freebie!

October 25, 2013

Happy Friday! I’m linking up today to share some random things from my week! 🙂

We have started our solar system unit and, to make it even more fun, we have some songs that we listen to and sing along! My kids love the songs by Mr. Parr! Here is the Solar System Song. And here are my kiddos singing along with it! :o)

Of course, you know me. I have to tie in my science to all of my content areas! We are learning about non-fiction text features so, as a way to get them to tell me what they already knew before I really “taught” the features, I made this poster, and they came up with all the features they knew about and their purpose. They did a great job actually! I won’t have much work in that arena, thank goodness.

Sooooo of course, we have to write about the solar system too! I’m using Joanne’s (from Head Over Heels for Teaching) Important Book Template and this will become their introduction paragraph of a bigger piece later, as well as a class book!

Students used their Science textbooks to find details about a planet of their choice. Come back next week to see their final published pieces! :o)

It took me a while this year for some reason, but I’m finally all decorated for Halloween! Here are some of my favorite decorative pieces:

And since I’m finally in the Halloween spirit, I’m planning some fun activities for next week in the classroom- all PC of course. 😉 One of the books we’ll read next week is The Widow’s Broom by Chris Van Allsburg.

It is a suspenseful story that’ll have the kids on the edge of their seats! Here is a lesson guide I found online with some ideas if you’re interested, as well as a great summary of the book.

And HERE is a mentor sentence FREEBIE to go along with the book, too! I’ll be using this next week with my kiddos. :o)

This freebie is offered as part of the Friday Fall Freebie Blog Hop!

Click here to go to the next blog for another freebie!

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Five For Friday Halloween Style

November 1, 2013

Our Halloween-type festivities (without ever using the word “Halloween” of course) were SOOOOO much fun! I’m going to share all of our good times, Five For Friday Style!

We used The Widow’s Broom for reading activities and our mentor sentence this week. They did a great job imitating the sentence on their own, being sure to include a prepositional phrase at the beginning and end of their sentence! It was hard to choose just four this time for the wall of fame!

This sentence was offered as a freebie in my TPT store– snatch it up for next year if you use mentor sentences in your room…or to do next week! It’s technically not a “Halloween book!”

We focused on prepositional phrases in grammar this week. A friend sent me this link to Lesson Plan SOS’s blog and I knew I had to do it this week! The kids each made two “ghost pops” out of Tootsie Pops, tissues, and string. They hid them around the room as everyone had their head down (so they couldn’t see where they were being hidden of course) and I played the Ghostbuster’s Theme Song.

Then, once they were hidden, they had to go find two ghosts and write sentences about where their ghosts were WITH prepositional phrases! They loved it! And loved eating their Tootsie Pops too.

Another fun grammar activity I like to throw in when I can are Mad Libs! I have some Halloween ones, so we completed those. It’s GREAT parts of speech practice, and they love reading their crazy stories!

How FUN does this look?!?!?

My kids wrote SPOOOOOOOKY stories on Thursday with only the light of their glowstick. They had an ABSOLUTE blast. Seriously. I turned on Pandora’s Spooky Symphonies station and they wrote and wrote and wrote. Not a PEEP out of them!

Some of them totally impressed me with their stories too! We had to go to the floor and share them (with only the glowsticks of course) and some of them were pretty scary! LOL

Check out my amazing fourth grade team!! We were the crayons who (didn’t) quit fourth grade! :o) It was such a fun day, and we got a ton of compliments -funny because it was such an easy costume to create! 😛

I’m saving one of our fun activities from this week to share tomorrow for my BBB Joanne’s Saturday linky- be sure to come back tomorrow and check it out! :o)

Mentor Texts and Mentor Sentences

Revisiting Mentor Sentences!

Mastering Mentor Sentences, Part 1!

Mastering Mentor Sentences, Part 2: Developing Better Writers

Solar System and Halloween Five For Friday… and Mentor Sentence Freebie!

Five For Friday Halloween Style

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