I realize

that I'm becoming a bit obsessive about Sentence Stalking, but I have never seen any one thing make such a difference in my students' reading and writing and in mine as well.

For the uninitiated, Sentence Stalking is that search for interestingly punctuated, precisely worded sentences that catch your fancy for one reason or another. Since becoming a stalker, I read more slowly - savoring the how and why of why a sentence is written in the way the author wrote it.

Our school - I teach at InterAmerican Academy in Guayaquil, Ecuador - has adopted sentence stalking in a big way. Our school is plastered with sentences harvested from our reading and written on sentence strips. Students pause and read. We take field trips around campus to find punctuation patterns or interesting figurative language that can be models for us in our writing. Sentence Stalking brings mentor texts down to the smallest level and can be used from Kindergarten to 12th grade. We're doing it. And we find, as teachers, that our writing is improving at the same time.