My class has been using mentor sentences from Ideas by Jivey this week to go along with the book "The Three Snow Bears" which is one of my favorite Jan Brett books. Click the pic to check out Jivey's unit 2 Mentor Sentences. I am a big fan of re-reading and re-reading text, so this fit my style perfectly. Students become fluent and confident when they re-read and that helps the struggling readers so much.
This unit contains mentor sentences from the following favorite read alouds:
-The Day The Crayons Quit By Drew Daywalt
-Diary of a Worm By Doreen Cronin
-Diary of a Fly By Doreen Cronin
-‘Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving By Dav Pilkey
-Snowmen at Night By Caralyn Buehner
-Snowmen at Christmas By Caralyn Buehner
-The Polar Express By Chris Van Allsburg
-Gingerbread Baby By Jan Brett
-The Three Snow Bears By Jan Brett
-Three Cheers for Tacky By Helen Lester
Day one was an introduction to the sentence. We talked about punctuation and parts of speech. We reviewed past tense verbs which we have been working on recently and I introduced collective nouns. Students glued the sentences into their grammar notebooks and marked the words we talked about. I thought they were pulling a fast one on me when they said that a group of kangaroos was called a "MOB!" So we had to google that one... they were right!
Jivey has a great blog post to show you how easy implementing mentor sentences is. They are very effective in building better writers. When students notice all of the parts of the sentence and get to imitate, you will see a better sentence structure quickly.
On day 2, we noticed adverbs.... I had to do it! I just had to play this song from Schoolhouse Rock to my kids! Click below to play the video. Sometimes it's a little difficult to hear what they are saying, but my kids caught a few adverbs to add to their notebooks.
We had to make an anchor chart with some examples because it is a very new concept.
Finally on day 3 they got to add some of their new adverbs to their notebooks! They also copied the sentence into their notebooks.
On day 4 of the mentor sentence, students got to imitate the sentence. This would take a little coaching from me as it is still fairly new and they really like to write 5-6 word sentences. We stretched the sentence out by adding adjectives to the subject part of the sentence. Some of them were successful in using an adverb and some were not, but it's a skill in progress and they will get it!
Thanks Jivey for creating such a useful tool for teaching grammar and sentence structure!
I am going to give away a copy of Jivey's Unit 1 Mentor Sentences for 2nd Grade
along with a copy of my new American Symbols Close Reading packet. I have designed these packets with differentiated texts and tiered questioning that fits each level of texts. Click the link to find out more about American Symbols Close Reading.
Enter to win using the rafflecopter below.
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