Middle School Grammar Mentor Sentences to Target Improvement in ELA

English Language Arts is all about reading, writing skills, listening and speaking. While separate skills, their interdependence is undeniable. When you teach writing, you get better readers. As students move from elementary to middle school ELA, the question surrounding every content area inevitably becomes, “When am I ever going to use this?!” The answer for writing? Ummmmm …every hour of every day!

Indeed, language in our world today is everywhere! People are communicating constantly, whether face to face, via social media, through text, audio, or paper. The age-old middle school argument does not hold water in 2019. That’s why it’s even more important to use proper mentor sentences to reinforce reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Here are some ways to use mentor sentences to target improvement in middle school ELA.

Use mentor sentences to scaffold and differentiate instruction.

As a Middle School ELA teacher, the enormity of the task before us can be daunting. Where should you start?
Two words: mentor sentences. The mentor sentence is the perfect jumping-off point for a writing lesson in virtually any level of writing instruction.

If you have students that struggle with simple sentence structure in their writing skills, start with mentor sentences that focus on a single subject and predicate. For middle school ELA students who have mastered this skill, move onto compound, complex sentence, and compound-complex sentence structures. The mentor sentences for middle school bundle contains focused lessons for Tuesday instructions on all types of sentence structures.

Because students focus on one well-written sentence for five lessons, the focus is clear and consistent. The routine begins in a very low-risk manner and progresses steadily, with plenty of scaffolding and support. Students move from initial observations about the mentor sentence to eventually rewriting and incorporating it into a paragraph in which they are assessed.

Use mentor sentences to teach voice and writing to a particular audience.

The public nature of most writing today acknowledges audience. Middle School ELA students know for whom they’re writing, but they don’t always recognize how to write for different audiences. Social media has also increased interactive writing and is a motivator for students who can clearly see the purpose in their writing. Share mentor sentences that show the voice of the author and how they connect to different audiences depending on the author’s purpose. By utilizing these mentor sentence like this you will see that your middle school students’ grammar skills will increase dramatically.

One challenge for the classroom teacher in the face of modern communication is connecting informal and formal writing together. Obviously most of writing on social media is informal, but still has value. The fluid nature of written language has always been acknowledged – know your audience. Students must learn the conventions to use in certain cases. Just like cursing is not okay in some settings, there are conventions that must be used in formal writing that are unnecessary when communicating informally.

Use mentor sentences to improve writing.

This steady introduction to writing instruction is a conceptual way for students to build their knowledge and use of language. So what’s next? WRITING. Lots of writing – twice as much as is currently happening. Are you ready to freak out about all of that grading coming your way? Don’t. The idea that teachers need to give detailed feedback on every single piece of writing is paralyzing. Turns out, just two points of encouragement and two points of constructive feedback for each assignment are sufficient. The mentor sentences for middle school bundle includes plenty of opportunities for your 6th-8th grade middle school ELA students to practice writing their own sentences!

Our students are waiting, and they have so much to say. Let’s teach them to speak their minds as you use mentor sentences to target improvement in middle school ELA.

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