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.

Looking for a Few Good Lines

Grammar is one of the hardest things to teach high school students and there are differing opinions on what is effective. I don't know much, but I know that worksheets and rote memorization are not what works. If it did, then high school freshmen would come to us knowing their parts of speech and we wouldn't need to reteach a thing.

But they don't, so we do.

So I'm taking a note from Jeff Anderson's playbook. He was in South Carolina recently and spoke to the teachers of a neighboring district. I didn't get to hear him speak, but I have a copy of Mechanically Inclined and I have friends that had front row seats. So I am incorporating his strategies into my freshmen English class. Please remember that I'm looking for anything and everything to help prepare them for the End of Course exam.

We started incorporating a sentence of the day today. In order to teach sentence structure and punctuation, I'm using mentor texts. My first one was not all that great, but I have every intention of improving. Today, we discussed commas in a series. I used a mentor sentence on the SmartBoard and simply asked students what they noticed. I got some good answers. I got some rotten answers. But I did get the words "commas" and "list." After we talked about the mentor sentence, we wrote a sentence together as a class following the example that the mentor sentence set. Then students wrote their own sentences incorporating the same techniques. They shared their sentences with their neighbor to check for accuracy. I circulated the room to check sentences and all students were 100% right on.

We didn't discuss rules. We didn't label sentence parts or parts of speech. We just looked at a good sentence, albeit not all that creative, and examined what the writer did.

So now I'm on the hunt for good sentences from good writers. I have a little Pat Conroy, a little Sharon Draper...I just need, oh, about 175 more sentences. That's not too much to ask, right?

Using Mentor Texts to Guide Writing

Katie Wood Ray says its all about "texts, texts, and more texts." If we want students to be good writers, then they have to be exposed to a wide variety of texts. The more reading experience they have, the better the writer that they will be.

So. Humph. I worked with a SAT-prep class today on essays. They were writing about power and corruption. There were some good, real-world examples in the essays. But the format of the essay...now that's another story. Our students often pigeonhole themselves into a five-paragraph format, or something close to it. The first thing that they do is repeat the question in the form of an answer. Then they very systematically give examples. The essays are almost perfunctory. There's no zest.

So I'm intrigued by the idea of influence from a mentor text. These students should be reading contemporary essays. (Of course, they should just be reading, period.) My hopes are that, through the use of mentor texts, they will see what authentic writing looks like and then will begin to experience such writing. Let's break out of the school-writing mode. Let's show students what real writers do and what they look like. Once they have those authentic writing experiences, then they are sure to improve.

And if you can write well, you can scale back and write to a formula. There's no problem.