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Displaying 1 - 2 of 6 reviews
April 10, 2023
I wasn’t terribly excited when this book was initially handed to all of the ELA teachers in my district. I thought of it as the newest “program” being pushed onto us to be discarded later like so many others I’ve experienced over the years. However, seeing improvement in student writing after using excerpts I’d pulled from published works by YA authors, I discovered (with a little help from some of the high school teachers) that the authors of this book had also utilized mentor texts in a mini-lesson format to provide teachers with a variety of texts and a basic a routine to help students get a firmer grasp of language conventions.
Even before I finished going through the book, I began inserting lessons as a warm up that takes up maybe 10 minutes of the class period. Each lesson focuses on a single concept such as: a sentence has a subject. Many students don’t understand this and regularly say that a complete sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a period; the idea of a subject never enters the equation, and they’re further confused about the difference between verbs and adjectives.
Next, we look at a sentence (or group of sentences) taken from a mentor text that features the day’s focus. Then we look at three separate changes that have been made to the text and discuss the impact the change has created. There is also writing involved where students create their own sentences modeled after the mentor text. This practice of reading, writing, talking has helped students learn to recognize and internalize concepts of conventions that before seemed arbitrary.
We are not all born with the gift of writing, but we all have the ability to improve. This is an effective tool in helping students achieve that particular goal–improving their reading and writing. 4.5
Even before I finished going through the book, I began inserting lessons as a warm up that takes up maybe 10 minutes of the class period. Each lesson focuses on a single concept such as: a sentence has a subject. Many students don’t understand this and regularly say that a complete sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a period; the idea of a subject never enters the equation, and they’re further confused about the difference between verbs and adjectives.
Next, we look at a sentence (or group of sentences) taken from a mentor text that features the day’s focus. Then we look at three separate changes that have been made to the text and discuss the impact the change has created. There is also writing involved where students create their own sentences modeled after the mentor text. This practice of reading, writing, talking has helped students learn to recognize and internalize concepts of conventions that before seemed arbitrary.
We are not all born with the gift of writing, but we all have the ability to improve. This is an effective tool in helping students achieve that particular goal–improving their reading and writing. 4.5
July 12, 2023
I really liked the ideas and lessons in the book. I am going to try to implement them this upcoming school year.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 6 reviews