Hands-on Grammar Lessons: Mentor Sentences

This is how I ended up using mentor sentences to teach grammar.

When I first started teaching, I taught grammar the way all of my colleagues did.

They used “Daily Oral Language,” or their interpretation of it.

We put up passages and had kids correct the errors…but it was always the same kids who noticed what was wrong with the passage, and the others weren’t getting the direct instruction they needed.

They relied on whether something “sounded right” and you know a lot of kids don’t have access to that kind of oral language!

On top of that, their writing wasn’t getting any better.

They were making the same kinds of errors that they were before I started using those editing paragraphs.

How Mentor Sentences Helped My Students

It wasn’t until I began implementing mentor sentences into my English language arts block for grammar instruction that I really understood how language worked.

While yes, I knew all about parts of speech and types of sentences, I had taught editing in isolation.

What I’d been doing wasn’t translating to students’ actual writing. But this was!

Mentor sentences changed everything about my grammar instruction because they model for students what a well-written sentence should look like and helped them apply grammar skills to create them.

It builds the writing habits and sentence structures students need to be able to write fluently! And building fluent writers is a HUGE focus for literacy instruction!

Why My Students Loved Mentor Sentences

Who doesn’t love a hands-on lesson?! These mentor sentence units include a fun hands-on lesson where students manipulate the words in the sentence to write it in different sentence structures.

It’s a great time to experiment and try new things to see if they work!

They also get to hunt for examples in their own books or your shared reading texts. Those sentence structures become more relevant when you’re exploring books through that lens!

Using Mentor Sentences Five Days a Week

Every week, students got a new sentence, which we dissected daily. Each day they had something new to do using the same sentence. You can grab an entire year’s worth of lessons here!

Here’s an overview of the five-day mentor sentence plan:

Monday: Introduce a new sentence and do a notebook activity to dissect the sentence. Color-code each piece of the sentence and introduce the academic vocabulary students need
Tuesday: Grammar hunt: hunt in students’ books or in shared reading texts for examples of the sentence type. Record them in the mentor sentence notebook.
Wednesday: Apply the same skill to new sentences: Provide students with examples of the new sentence and have them break it apart and identify the parts. This is also a good day for a handout from your grammar curriculum or the ones I include in my mentor sentences resources!
Thursday: Manipulate the sentence: put the words on cards and have students move the pieces around to build the same idea in a different structure.
Friday: Create your own sentence and Weekly quiz: today is the day students apply their learning! They can build their own sentence in the same structure, and you can also have them practice dictation. It’s also the day you can give a quiz and get a grade for your grade book! Quizzes are included in the mentor sentence resources, too!

Tips for using mentor sentences with your students

Every day you use the same sentence but focus on a different skill.
Use the book students are reading, could be their own book, shared reading book, or your modeled reading book, to find similar type of sentences. (Connecting reading and writing!)
If you use it weekly, it becomes a habit, and students can eventually do it on their own in a station/center.
Since students are using color pencils or markers, it makes it fun for them.
Students begin to mimic the sentence in their writing and writing improves.

Wondering which mentor sentences resource to start with? Try the Fourth Grade Mentor Sentences for Grammar. This resource builds the foundation of what will be expected throughout the other mentor sentences resources.

And even though it says fourth grade, I have used this resource with third graders and have had great success!

Click: Fourth Grade Mentor Sentences for Grammar