Mentor Sentence Monday: Cynthia Rylant

Word cloud created using text from
When I Was Young in the
Mountains by Cynthia Rylant.

Cynthia Rylant’s books are swimming with wonderful craft perfect for teaching kids to write compound and complex sentences with commas. Her book, When I Was Young in the Mountains is chock full.

Rylant’s words:

When I was young in the mountains, we walked across the cow pasture and through the woods, carrying our towels. The swimming hole was dark and muddy, and we sometimes saw snakes, but we jumped in anyway.

I generated the following sentences using Rylant’s words as the pattern:

When I was young in Green Valley, we rode our banana seat bikes across the railroad tracks and through the back alleys, carrying our towels around our necks. The city pool was crowded, and sometimes little kids peed in the shallow end, but we jumped in anyway.