In Mechanically Inclined, Jeff Anderson teaches sentence stalking, a way to use mentor texts of any length to draw students' attention to an author's craft, the goal being to highlight what is done well rather than to take kids on an error hunt.
What concepts can we teach from the following sentence?
“Paralyzed, my face on fire, I could only look at her, shocked at what I had done (Ida B 212).
Notice the participles at the beginning and end of the sentence. Notice the commas that accompany them.
Play with the syntax. Shuffle the parts of the sentence in a different order. Which one is preferable?
Talk about the imagery of a face on fire. What does that look like?
What other concepts do you see?
“Paralyzed, my face on fire, I could only look at her, shocked at what I had done (Ida B 212).
Notice the participles at the beginning and end of the sentence. Notice the commas that accompany them.
Play with the syntax. Shuffle the parts of the sentence in a different order. Which one is preferable?
Talk about the imagery of a face on fire. What does that look like?
What other concepts do you see?
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