Gator Grammar Greatness
Posted by Ariel WarshawFifth grade writers have been practicing their grammar skills each and every week using mentor sentences. Instead of the grammar worksheets of yesteryear, students get to dissect exemplar sentences using magnetic manipulatives and their custom “Gator Grammar” workbooks. This practice helps solidify grammatical features and vocabulary, making it part of the natural language of our classroom. Moreover, these mentor sentences push our writers to expand their syntactic understanding and usage.
Each Monday, a new sentence is introduced to the class; students receive a sentence strip to add to their workbook, and it is also written on our Sentence Study whiteboard. We then analyze it, looking for parts of speech, point of view, figurative language, punctuation, and more. The fifth graders get quite competitive when it’s time to label our sentence on the whiteboard!
“Is ‘green’ a noun or an adjective?”
“Wait, I see alliteration!”
“There are 3 independent clauses in that sentence – it must be a compound sentence!”
Midweek, students are tasked with revising our mentor sentence. This means adding, removing, moving, or substituting words to make the sentence more descriptive or interesting – but not changing the overall meaning of the example. This revision process helps reinforce vocabulary skills and the parts of speech.
We conclude each week by crafting our own imitations of the mentor sentence. Students must use the same sentence structure as the example, but create their own sentences. This task requires the writers to not simply revise or edit – they must synthesize what they have learned about the mentor sentence and produce something novel and inspired. These student-generated imitation sentences are then used to determine our weekly “featured writers.” Using anonymous polling and teacher discretion, the top 2 sentences in each Writing Seminar class are honored on our “Featured Writers” bulletin board each week. The students love to hear what their classmates have constructed. More importantly, their own writing – and writing confidence – has grown tremendously through the analysis, evaluation, revision, and application skills they’ve gained through this dynamic process.
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