Ways to Use Mentor Sentences to Teach Middle School Grammar

Proper grammar has suffered in classrooms over the last 15 years. It is easy to point fingers at social media and texting, but instead of placing blame and allowing the lols, emojis, and YOLOs from becoming a teacher’s worst nightmare, there is hope with mentor sentences! Mentor sentences help to bridge the gap between grammar, writing, and reading. Here are some ways to use mentor sentences to teach middle school grammar.

WHAT ARE MENTOR SENTENCES?

Mentor sentences are model sentences that are properly formatted, engaging, and come already written! In fact, mentor sentences can come from a text you are reading in class, a pleasure book, or even from the world wide web. The best place to find mentor sentences is in the books or texts you are reading in class. However, this could be time consuming. Take the guesswork out of mentor sentence lesson planning with middle school grammar activities featuring mentor sentences.

In this day and age of virtual learning, making copies or handing out hard-copies of assignments may not necessarily be an option. These mentor sentence grammar activities are a one stop shop for digital learning as well as for face-to-face learning. The lessons and mentor sentences provide teachers the perfect option for analyzing their students’ writing with grammar intertwined. Check out how to use these mentor sentence grammar activities in your middle school ELA classroom.

BELL RINGERS

First, use mentor sentence grammar activities for daily bell ringer work. Mentor sentences from different mentor texts allow your students to review different middle school grammar concepts including the following:

• PREPOSITIONS
• VERBS
• NOUNS
• ADJECTIVES
• SENTENCE STRUCTURE
• PUNCTUATION
• FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
• WORD MEANINGS

To begin, there are lessons and grammar activities for each day of the week. The options for activities are limitless! One of the ways you can implement mentor sentence activities is to use them as bell ringers to start the class. Bell ringers are a great way to reinforce and activate prior knowledge or introduce new concepts.

INTERACTIVE NOTEBOOKS FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL GRAMMAR

Next, interactive notebooks are a key component to building on concepts for review and reinforcement. They are also a great option for teachers to use as artifacts when evaluating student work, analyzing student growth, and assessing understanding. Interactive notebooks can be done digitally or as a hard copy. 

With this middle school grammar  resource you have three options to create an interactive notebook: 

• Weekly mentor sentences that can be glued into notebooks
• Glue full worksheets into notebooks with room to write notes
• Grammar activities to be projected for the students to copy down.

In addition, virtual students can easily download the worksheet and create a Google slide or PowerPoint interactive notebook. Using mentor sentences from novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, Call of the Wild, and Dear Evan Hansen are perfect ways to get started with interactive notebooks for your middle school grammar units.

DIFFERENTIATED GRAMMAR STATIONS

Next, the goal of differentiated instruction is to provide a variety of learning opportunities for all students to be successful, regardless of their learning styles and learning levels. Here are a few ideas to differentiate your grammar stations while utilizing mentor sentences.

REVIEW GRAMMAR CONCEPTS

Try using different stations to focus on specific grammar concepts reviewed in the mentor sentences grammar bundle.

REVIEW READING STRATEGIES

If your students are reading a specific text or story, include a variety of stations that incorporate reading strategies and literature concepts.
For example, you may include stations that use mentor sentences to review grammar. In addition, you can add a station that utilizes graphic organizers to break down or analyze the story. Finally, an additional station may focus on vocabulary for the story. The possibilities are endless! With the use of the mentor sentence activities, stations are pretty much embedded in the activities.

GOOGLE FORMS

Another way differentiating just got easier is with the branching feature in Google Forms. Use the mentor sentence activities as the base and build off of the activities you would normally do in your lesson.

Students will move through the pages based on correct or incorrect responses. If a student gets an incorrect response, the form can branch off into a mini lesson to reinforce the concept. If they get it right they can move on to the next clue. This allows for remediation if students are struggling and for those who are breezing through it, you can branch off into enrichment activities.

SCAVENGER HUNT

Finally, differentiate your grammar activities by providing students an engaging scavenger hunt! Have your students search for the specified activity in their choice of a story or an assigned text. Students can work independently or in small groups. Make it a competition or a game by giving them a time limit or a prize for the winner. 

Of course, the best thing about mentor sentences is you are literally getting a three for one. You are reinforcing reading, writing, and grammar all in one activity. The ultimate goal of utilizing mentor sentences is to help your students understand the importance of grammar as it pertains to reading and writing. Mentor sentences are a powerful tool in a teacher’s toolbox and a tool that you don’t have to spend countless hours learning how to use.

Get started using mentor sentences to teach middle school grammar with your students. How will you use mentor sentences in your ELA classroom?

FREE GRAMMAR REFERENCE NOTEBOOK

Another great grammar resource for middle school ELA teacher is my FREE grammar reference notebook. It can be used with any grammar lesson or activity. 

Click below to get it sent straight to your inbox. 

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