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 – 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 -!

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 – 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 – 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!