Vignette 3.6. Unpacking Sentences
Designated ELD Instruction in Grade One (cont.)going to show them some ways to unpack sentences so they can understand them better. She
shows her students a tightly packed suitcase.
Mrs. Fabian: Sometimes, it is hard to see all the things inside the suitcase when it is
packed in tightly like that. (Pulling out some of the things that are packed
inside – a shirt, a pair of pants, some books and shoes.) When we unpack
the suitcase a little, we can see the different things that are in there. Some
sentences are like suitcases. When they are jammed full of many different
words, they can be hard to understand, but when we unpack sentences and
take the words apart we can understand the meanings more easily.
Mrs. Fabian reads a passage from one of the informational texts about bees that she has
previously read and discussed with the whole class. She follows the procedure her team is
using to show the students how to unpack or break down densely packed sentences.
Mrs. Fabian: Children, today we’re going to be looking closely at a couple of sentences
we’ve seen in the books about bees. Here’s the first sentence.
She shows the children a sentence from the book The Honeymakers, by Gail Gibbons,
which is written on a sentence strip and placed in the pocket chart.
“As the forager bee collects nectar, she carries pollen from flower to flower.”
(Gibbons, p. 15)
Mrs. Fabian: I’m going to model for you how I unpack sentences that have a lot of
information in them. (Points to the sentence and reads it slowly, thinking
aloud.) Hmm. It seems like this sentence is mostly about a bee doing some
different things.
As Mrs. Fabian thinks aloud, she pulls shorter sentence strips from behind the original
sentence and places them in the rows below, visually unpacking the meaning of the sentence
so that students can see the break down. She reads each sentence as she places it in the
pocket chart.
There’s a forager bee.
The bee collects nectar.
The bee has pollen on its legs.
The bee carries the pollen to many flowers.
Mrs. Fabian: Can you see how I unpacked or separated all the ideas in the sentence?
There are really just two big ideas. The first is that the bee is collecting
nectar, and the second is that the bee is carrying pollen to the flowers. But
these ideas are connected in a special way. There’s a really important word in
the sentence that’s connecting the ideas. The word “as” at the beginning of
the sentence tells me that the two things are happening at the same time.
Mrs. Fabian pulls out another sentence strip and places it under the sentences.
As = At the same time
She has the children read the original sentence with her chorally. Then they read the
shorter sentences followed once again by the sentence with the word as in it. She models
how to unpack another sentence and follows the procedure of thinking aloud as she pulls the
shorter sentences from the pocket chart.Grade 1 Chapter 3 | 271