Jivey – Master Mentor Sentences K-2

As a mentor, a professional development leader, and a fellow teacher, these are a few of the common complaints I hear:

• “Teaching grammar is boring. The students hate it and, honestly, so do I.”

• “My students don’t make the reading-writing connection.”

• “My students make little progress in style and conventions over the course of the year.”

• “I’m tired of the basal, but I don’t know what else to do to cover the standards.”

I imagine you landed on this course page because you share some (or all) of those sentiments. You are ready to make a change, just like I was several years ago. I thought, I am already using children’s literature to teach my mini-lessons in reading and writing. Why not use those books for grammar, too?

It made sense to me that students needed to learn from amazing, well-written sentences… giving them a sentence filled with mistakes and telling them to “fix it” wasn’t working since they didn’t even know what it was supposed to look like to begin with!

IT IS POSSIBLE for students to love grammar and writing!

Don’t just take my word for it…

Using a mentor text that students already love help them become invested in the sentence they are analyzing. Implementing a routine where students know what to expect DAILY ensures that students will feel comfortable with the tasks.

Because the majority of mentor sentence lessons are driven through discussion about what the students notice and create, it is a truly differentiated practice. A lesson with one sentence in one classroom won’t be identical to the same lesson in another classroom.

You truly will see a difference in ALL students’ learning and writing skills!