Beautiful language

One of the new strategies the English department is looking at this year has really impacted our grammar instruction. Each week students work with "mentor" sentences that I choose from my reading--I try to insure these sentences are high impact and beautifully written. As a class we discuss what we notice, and kids usually notice quite a lot about syntax and mechanics. The next day I write a sentence of my own based on the mentor sentence template--and finally, students write their own. We looked today at some beautifully constructed sentences, examples of powerful writing. Our hope as an English department is that this scaffolding will help students improve the complexity of their writing. Here are two sentences students wrote today:

• She sits on the bed lonely, watching old pictures flip past in her scrapbook, waiting for good memories once again. 
• She sits on the porch steps lonely, watching the leaves rattle in the wind, waiting for someone to tell her it's just a dream. 

GORGEOUS!