A few weeks ago Jessica, from Ideas by Jivey, posted about her Mentor Sentences for Kindergarten on Instagram. She was looking for kindergarten and ELL teacher bloggers to try her Mentor Sentences pack out. I saw Jessica present in Vegas and right away I was very excited to see more about this so I emailed her! She was so kind to send us her Mentor Sentences for Kindergarten pack and I was super excited to take a look at it!
Within this pack there are mentor sentence lessons for 10 different books. The lessons can be done whole group or small group and are extremely kid friendly and perfect for emergent readers. Jessica clearly lays out what to do each day of the lesson and provides the materials you will need for the lesson. This makes everything so nice for teachers!
I decided to use the mentor sentence lessons for the book Today I Feel Silly. I did the lessons with a small group of students. Here is how I used the mentor sentences with my students each day:
Day 1 -I read the book and showed my students the mentor sentence. We read it and then shared all about the sentence. We counted the number of words, found uppercase letters, found the period, etc. We do a message everyday and this was really similar to that!
Day 2 - For this part of the lesson, students put the mentor sentence back in the correct order. My students were really successful with this and I found that they could read the sentence back to me when I asked them to read it.
Day 3 - Within the Mentor Sentence Pack, there are 12 different feeling/mood vocabulary cards. For this part of the lesson we looked at the cards and talked about the word and picture on the card and when we might feel that way. Then the students finished the sentence, "Today I am ______." I wrote what they picked on the chart paper. My students were in a happy and excited mood! For the last sentence I wrote how I was feeling. I told them I was feeling proud because they were doing such a nice job and I was proud of my students! I love this part of the lesson because I think it is so important for my students to see me modeling writing for them. We talked about using an uppercase letter, spaces, and a period to end their sentence. The more writing they see, the more confident they become as writers!
Day 4 -On Day 4 of the lesson, my students picked how they were feeling and made their own "Today I am ______." sentence. I really love the vocabulary cards that Jessica includes in this pack because my students were able to use those as a resource to help them spell the word. It was so cute because some of them said they were happy because they were at school! One of my students said, "Now I can spell happy at home and I don't have to ask my dad!"
I had my students draw a little picture to go with their sentence and glue it on their sentence strip. They were so excited to take this home!
Do you want to try Mentor Sentences with your students?? Jessica has been so kind to give a copy to TWO lucky winners!!! Just enter the Rafflecopter below for your chance to WIN!
Be sure to check out Jessica's post on her blog about Mentor Sentences! She even has a video in the post where she models for you how to use them in the classroom! Click her blog button to check it out!