Compound sentences are all about bringing ideas together or showing how those ideas relate to one another. There is a real opportunity when we start talking about combining sentences together to help build the classroom community and share how our writing looks in different situations. The very nature of conjunctions suggests jointness. It is during these mentor text lessons where I will increase the level of movement and partner work to show how we can generate ideas together. When completing the mentor text routine, I look at how I can book talk mentor text books so students want to read them, and I use the whole class novels that we study during this marking period to show example sentences. Last year, I covered the conjunctions “and” and “but.” This year, I am also adding the conjunction “so” to tie in some cause and effect lessons. This post will outline the mentor text slides and activities used for each sequence of lessons for compound sentences with the conjunctions “and,” “but,” and “so.”

Highlights of each conjunction:

• But-This conjunction is fun to say to middle schoolers over and over, and it shows opposites.

• And-This conjunction connects ideas and shows addition.

• So-This conjunction shows cause and effect, and the ideas here can transfer over to other cause and effect work in class.