Spotting Grammar Patterns from Mentor Texts in Independent Reading

 

"Mrs. Essenburg!" The hiss broke the silence, following a hand urgently shooting into the air. It was the first 10 minutes of 6th period, when the 4th and 5th graders and I were all reading our independent choice books. I put my book down and made my way over to the excited student, and he whispered, "There's a pattern we did before!" pointing to a line in Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate: “…round and bare and waiting…” (21). 

The pattern that had been the focus of our study the previous week was adjectives following linking verbs, using as a mentor text these two sentences from Brianne Farley’s picture book Ike’s Incredible Ink: “Shadows, he thought, are like ink. They are shady and shifty and mysterious.”

But we’d also talked about how the sentence was different from the pattern for series that was usually taught: “shady, shifty, and mysterious.” We talked about why the writer might have chosen to use a different pattern from normal, what effect that might have. We decided it made the series last longer, making us think more about each word. Also, it makes it seem like the last word in the list might not be the end—there might be more adjectives, and these were just the first ones that came, one at a time, to mind. It's the beauty of using really good mentor texts: there's usually more than one thing going on in the writing. 

This student, the one hissing at me about the pattern in his independent reading book, is one of the best writers in the room, the one you don't feel you can really teach anything--you just try to get out of their way. I'm so delighted that I got to give him the key of consciously reading like a writer.

Here’s the whole context. Home of the Brave is a novel in verse. The narrator is Kek, a boy who is a refugee from South Sudan, adjusting to life in Minnesota—winter, English, no cows, and much more. He envies his cousin’s tribal scars, then continues:
I try hard not to look at 
another scar,
the place where Ganwar’s left hand
should be,
round and bare and waiting
like an ugly question
no one can answer.

It’s an amazing novel—I highly recommend it. While using the limited English of a child learning the language, it communicates what it is like to make that trip across miles and cultures and trauma and loss and imbues the reader with respect for those who make it. 

And, as I approach the end of this year of my experiment with teaching elementary and with using Patterns of Power to teach grammar at the intersection of reading and writing, I’m happy that this book is one of the places that intersection happened.