Utilizing mentor text can be one of those game changers!  Mentor texts are simply good examples of writing.  In teacher terms, examples to use for modeling that you do not have to create!  For instances, Step Up to Writing identifies 6 tools to use when starting a narrative.  Rather than try and write examples of each, have students dive into books and study how each author started the narrative.  Students become enamored with looking at the actual craft of writing.  Some teachers call it sentence stalking.  Instead of reading the text for meaning, have students stalk or observe the actual writing. For example, students cannot only look at specific tools/craft (how did the author start the narrative) but can also study the craft of sentence structure.  This is an easy way to implement grammar into a more authentic practice than worksheets.  For lower elementary, this might look like what words are capitalized or not capitalized and why.  Observing other punctuation that is used (dash, colon, hyphen, comma, exclamation mark, question mark, etc) and making an effort to tell why and how the author used it. In a paragraph, does the author use a majority of simple, compound, or complex sentences? This will lead to discussions about the importance of sentence fluency in our writing.  Another area to stalk is noticing the author’s word choice or the organization of the sentence. More to come as Seward Elementary and I start planning a weekly schedule for implementing more mentor text.