This year I have started using mentor sentences.  Overall I am very happy with them.  If you haven’t heard of this strategy it is basically where you take a sentence from a text and have students study the sentence structure and vocabulary of the sentence.  They also write similar sentences.

With my ESOL pull out groups I have been doing a modified version of this.  I typically have two or three days a week that I can devote some time to mentor sentences. Sometimes I use a read-aloud that also contains a comprehension strategy that we will be focusing on.   Recently I have started using poetry or short texts as well.  This allows me to still show students the sentence in context but doesn’t take up as much time as reading an entire book.