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?

Fear and Loathing in Grammarville

Grammar. It’s a word that causes most high school students and younger to shudder in fear. It’s a weakness. Sally is a poor speller, Mark can’t get his subjects and verbs to agree, and Shana just runs on through the sentences.

As a junior high school student, grammar was as unrelated to reading as it could possibly get. There were two separate classes with two separate teachers to cover the grammar and reading lessons. God bless Mrs. Wall—she had the most hated job in school. She drilled grammar into us on a daily basis through 7th and 8th grades. She was unrelenting. She was the grammar drill sergeant.

But I know my grammar. Is it because it was kept separate? Is it because grammar was drilled into my head for an hour every day? What makes my grammar abilities stronger than those of my students whom I teach? Is it the way it was taught or is it because I was an honors student? And could it possibly be that I am better at grammar after my college grammar class than I ever was in high school? Shudder at the thought, but could I have possibly been as bad as the students I teach at naming nouns and pronouns and verbs.

The times have changed and high school teachers often see freshmen that cannot tell the nouns from the verbs. (I love the commercials: Verb, its what you do.) The current generation of high school students are media based. They are thrill-seekers. They are looking for the easy way out and rote memorization and knowing-it-for-the-sake-of-knowing-it just will not do. Grammarians must look for new ways to pass on their love of the standard written word. While they may shudder at making grammar lessons fun, surely its better than hearing yet another politician butcher the pronoun “myself”. It is time to change grammar lessons. Out with the DOL! Out with the memorizing! It is high time to relate grammar to the students and the reading that they are expected to do. It’s time to make grammar more accessible to all students—even the ones that aren’t honors level. So be proud, grammarians. Make your lessons fun and spread the grammar love.