Mentor Sentences

I've been mining my books for mentor sentences to use for writing lessons in English I. I just started a new book by Karen White, The Memory of Water, and it is rife with beautiful sentences. Here are just a few:

For thousands of years, the Atlantic Ocean has beat against the beach of my childhood, its watery fingers stealing more and more of the soft silted sand, grabbing at the estuaries and creeks of the South Carolina Lowcountry, leaving us with the detritus of old forests, battered dunes, and bleeding loss.

I feel this sentence is long and complex. There is beautiful imagery, alliteration, and personification. When discussing this line, I think I would focus on the personification. This will be a hard sentence to use as a model, but there are wondrous words.

I'd never tattled on her. Looking back, I suppose that even then I'd known that her self-destructive behavior would simply find a more dangerous outlet.

The language of these two sentences is not what I would want students to mimic. In this case, the author has used a short sentence followed by a long sentence, which students need to be able to do in order to create rhythmic writing. The simple followed by complex is an ideal pattern for young writers to learn.

So far, using mentor sentences to teach sentences structures and literary devices has been very successful. Students are writing wonderful, diverse sentences and are experimenting with commas and other punctuation styles. The conversations have been ideal. I can only hope that teaching grammar and sentence structure this way, instead of though DOL in which students copy down incorrect sentences, will transfer to their standardized tests and writing samples. I've got my fingers crossed.