My students come from a small, rural community. Our district is a Title I School with sixty two percent of the population qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. We are also seeing a growing population of ELL students from the Congo. The range and reading levels of my second graders range from preK to 4th grade. My class is a great group of second graders with a broad scope of interests in authors, series, and picture books. They are reading on many different ability levels, and include English Language Learners at very different points of their language acquisition (and different first languages).
My school has recently fully implemented the reading workshop model and I am excited for my students to become the best reader they can be!
Since we teach grammar and writing through reading my class will need mentor texts to go with the mentor sentence unit.
My Project
The idea behind mentor sentences is that students will notice all the good things about a sentence and use those techniques in their own writing. It is also a great way to present grammar in a spiral method.
Mentor sentences are a wonderful way to show students how writing should look, as opposed to some programs that fill a sentence with mistakes for the students to find.
I need most of the books to teach the units. Each week I use the books to do an interactive read aloud. Most of these books are familiar texts and are chosen specifically for the craft the author uses.
On Monday I give the students the sentence to glue down in their notebook. They rewrite the sentence and things they notice about it. The students always want to try to guess why I chose the sentence. This helps them "think like a writer." On Tuesday the students label all of the parts of speech that they know. On Wednesday, they revise the the sentence, trying to make it even better than it already is. On Thursday the students imitate the sentence. This is where they practice writing like the author, and hopefully ingraining it to memory to use the same style in their own writing. At the end of the week they take a quiz that goes along with the focus of the lesson that week.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Sparks and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
