Student Motivation Saturday: Mentor Sentences

What a beautiful fall morning, to finally find a few spare moments to get back to my blog, by joining one of my blogging buddies Joanne with Student Motivation Saturday!

 

We have been using another blogging buddy, Jivey's Mentor Sentences since the first part of the year {crazy to think conferences are almost here! Where is all of that time going?} It took a week or two for students to understand the process, but now they LOVE it!

The added details on this board mostly came from freebies. You can check out where here.

Their favorite part of the week is when they have a chance to revise and imitate. I created a bulletin board that changes weekly {usually with a picture of the mentor text on it as well... forgot it this last week, whoops!} and the students eagerly work and beg to be on the board. I teach multiple sections of communications, so I can only pick a few from each section to make it on the board. It's a pretty huge honor for the kiddos who make it. I've also been keeping track so that every student will have their chance to shine.

Whoops... missed the second missing comma in the bottom one.

What sticks out to me, is the amount of hands that shoot up throughout the week when it's time to share. I've been in classrooms that use Daily Oral Language, and in my experience, it was like pulling teeth to get a response that wasn't "add a capital" or "add a period" (even if the punctuation should have been a question or exclamation point.)

Want to motivate your students to become involved in the ELA curriculum, excited, and learning? Dig out some of those great works of children's literature and use them as mentor texts. There are some great products out there that take out the work in putting mentor sentences together in easy to implement formats (see one from Jivey and one from the Collaboration Cuties.)

I encourage you to check them out!