Mentor Sentences in First Grade!!

I am so happy to be back sharing some great ideas with you! I have been gone for a while but I am dedicated to sharing great ideas that are best practice and work in the classroom! Today I am going to be talking about Mentor Sentences. 

I don't know about you but our district has really emphasized and highlighted the use of mentor sentences in our ELA Block. It only takes 10 min (once your routine is established) and is critical for learning parts of speech (conventions).  If I am being honest, I just knew this was gonna be crazy hard for my students and were they REALLY going to use the vocabulary... well ... my students have shown such great growth just over the last 4 weeks of implementing this! They are loving it! 

I am going to share today a little snippet of what you would see in my room if you came to view Mentor Sentences. 

First, students have their own Mentor Sentence notebook. We use a composition notebook like this one. It's not fancy, but it works. 

Next, each Monday, on their desks, students receive a paper that looks like this. 

Each student then cuts the paper and glues it in their notebook and you are ready for the week! My kids call that easy peasy!

Once the logistics are done, you are ready to begin your lesson. I do this right after my phonics lesson, but before my comprehension lesson and it goes very smoothly. We tried after lunch and it was not working well for my kids, so we switched it to the morning! 

This is an example of a student work. Note: This is very guided with heavy scaffolding and prompt and support. 

In my packet, you will see that there is a sheet that is organized with each day and what to expect. I have outlined it to have examples of what could POSSIBLY be seen in the sentence or what your students could possibly say. This is not an end-all-be-all to the mentor sentence! This is just how I have used it. Some weeks we have a main focus on a skill or part of speech, (the week above was verbs and -ck), and some weeks we don't. I have compiled the mentor sentences to be used with commonly used books that each teacher has or can get from their school library. 

To get my packet you can go here, to my TPT store. Included is 6 weeks of mentor texts and sentences. Highlights and instructions on how to implement and examples from my own experience. 

Do you use mentor sentences? If so, do you love it? How has it improved your students writing and grammar? 

Thank you for reading! 

Mrs. C