The document discusses using mentor sentences in a grammar curriculum. It describes displaying a mentor sentence for the week and having students notice, revise, and imitate it. Students diagram sentences one year but it did not work well the previous year. Previous schools assessed mentor sentences with similar questions to state tests, giving practice and grades. A linked resource provides more information on mentor sentences.

1. MENTOR SENTENCES
Parts of Daily Grammar Practice work for me. I use them in my
BIG 5 as morning work. I incorporate my Mentor Sentence into
my Language Arts block.
I always write the sentence on a poster or sentence strip that stays
up the entire week. I do all of my noticing, revising, etc. using my
document camera and interactive board.
Day 1: Invitation to Notice/Identify. I combined the two days
because of lack of time. I allow them to Notice first...then we
share. Then they Identify, and we share again.
Day 2: Invitation to Revise
Day 3: Invitation to Imitate
Day 4: Diagram it! One year this worked amazingly. The students
loved diagramming...and I admit I love it as well. It really helped
me when I was a student to quickly identify parts of speech. I
was/am a very visual learner and by diagramming I was able to
visualize every single part of speech. Last year this didn't work so
well for my kids, it just didn't click. So this year I'm not doing it, at
least to start with.
Finally my previous school did make assessments for the Mentor
Sentences that were worded very similar to state testing. This gave
the students that practice (for testing) and us teachers grades! They
usually consisted of 10 questions. A few used the mentor sentence
with one error, and they had to find it and explain why that
sentence needed that particular "thing" (ex: why does it need a
comma there). The other questions had to do with the grammar or
structure of the sentence that we really focused on that week and
possibly the week prior (ex: commas, semicolons, nouns, adjective,
etc.)
There is a GREAT resource that I found called Ideas By Jivey
(here is the link). It may give you more/better information, and has
some great links as well.