Unpacking Sentences, Packing in Learning

12-MINUTE VIDEO- Sentence Unpacking - Hugo Lawton - Greenleaf - 4th - 1.24.18

By Hugo Lawton, 
4th Grade Teacher at Greenleaf Elementary

One sentence. Fifty-three minutes. As an educator still developing his time management skills, I can usually rely on my students’ subtle hints telling me to move on, but not during this lesson, my first attempt at Sentence Unpacking, in which their engagement seemed as if it could sustain indefinitely. While academic discussions are commonplace in my classroom, they are usually centered around broad concepts and models, requiring students to utilize their background knowledge and problem-solving skills to talk about issues. Before putting the Sentence Unpacking ELD strategy into practice, I never would have considered the depth of conversation that can be prompted by a single sentence. Not only did the sentence unpacking strategy help to facilitate a meaningful, engaging discussion for my students, but it also helped them to interact with several ELD standards and language conventions through the lens of social studies content.

As a teacher in a classroom and community with a high number of English Language Learners, I am always looking for new ways to strengthen my students’ English skills and their comfort with using English in a variety of settings. This strategy helped students to analyze the language features found within a sentence from a complex text we read as a class. Not only this, but students were also able to practice using the language feature of focus in their own writing.

I first encountered the unpacking sentences ELD strategy in a meeting with the Instructional Leadership Team at my school, during which time I indicated interest in working with the ELLMA office to showcase my own learning of the strategy and how my students benefited from it. After reading through the description of this strategy, it was clear to me that the strategy had the potential to be a high leverage routine in my classroom. Not only does the sentence unpacking strategy help students to understand texts with complex sentences, it helps them to analyze the content and language contained within complex texts, so that they can draw deeper meaning from what they read. While the strategy scaffolds this process and provides a clear procedure for students to follow, it sets the groundwork for students to be more independent in tackling more challenging texts.

In preparation for my first sentence unpacking lesson, I first looked through complex texts that I had already planned on utilizing during shared reading time. While my students’ reading levels vary greatly, I chose a grade-level text to unpack and incorporated differentiation into the lesson plan to make sure the text was accessible to all of my students. The text I chose was adapted from a GLAD unit on the California gold rush. The unit is structured around expert groups, with each group learning about a certain population’s experience during the gold rush. The text that I utilized for this initial sentence unpacking lesson was about miners who traveled to California from Mexico in the hopes of striking it rich. Within this text, I first found a sentence to focus on in the lesson. I selected the following sentence:

Because of this, California passed a law that made foreign miners pay $20 a month, a lot of money in those days, in order to work.

This sentence is an ideal one for the sentence unpacking strategy because it contains several chunks that provide opportunities for discussions about both content and language.

Once I had chosen the sentence, I then chunked the sentence for myself into sections that had the potential to provide meaningful discussion. I chunked the sentence based on meaning and language features, in this way:

Because of this, California passed a law that made foreign miners pay $20 a month, a lot of money in those days, in order to work.

Each of the chunks chosen contribute to the overall meaning of the sentence. To be able to unpack the sentence in a thorough way, students need to analyze these individual chunks, determine their meanings, and evaluate how those meanings contribute to the sentence as a whole.

In order for me to help students to be able to do this, I recorded all of the meanings of these chunks as simple sentences. There were countless simple sentences that I determined from these chunks, some of which were:

All foreign miners couldn’t work without paying $20.

$20 was a lot of money in those days.

(Inference) White lawmakers and miners wanted to discourage people from other countries coming to CA.

(Inference) White miners were racist.

Mapping out all of the simple sentences found within the chunks, including inferences I drew from those chunks, helped me to predict and prepare for my work with students on these chunks.

All of these simple sentences helped to unpack the meanings found within the sentence, but I then needed to identify the language features that this sentence contained in order to teach their purposes and to help students identify the features in other contexts and use them in their own writing. Note that, in this first sentence unpacking lesson, I chose a sentence that was rich with language and then unpacked the language features inside the sentence, but this strategy is also effective when the sentence chosen has specific language features that you are looking to target based on the ELD standards or areas in which students need support. In this sentence, I chose to focus on the introductory clause, “Because of this,” and the explanatory phrase, “a lot of money in those days.”

See OUSD Sentence Unpacking - 4th Grade  Mexican Immigrants - Gold Rush lesson plan for reference.

While this planning process may seem substantial, it is similar to the work I would have done when preparing for any close reading of a complex text, and helped me to more closely understand the text and its chunks myself, helping to prepare me to guide students through the process. As I implement the sentence unpacking strategy more and the routines solidify, this planning process will become more manageable. When it came time to teach the lesson, it was clear how this meaningful, thorough planning process placed me in a strong position to help my students unpack the sentence and analyze its meaning and structure.

During my first implementation of the sentence unpacking strategy, I was impressed by how smoothly and effectively the procedure facilitated my students’ thinking and understanding of the sentence. As captured in the video, my students began with an accurate but basic understanding of what the sentence meant, drawing largely on their prior knowledge of the gold rush. As we progressed through the chunks and they had opportunities to discuss their ideas about the meanings, I was pleased with how visibly their understandings were deepening - not only of the content and ideas expressed within the sentence, but also with how those ideas were communicated. Particularly, students’ abilities to identify the value of explanatory phrases, and use them, were clearly strengthened throughout the lesson. At the conclusion of the lesson, students were able to reflect on how this strategy helped them understand the gold rush more deeply, and they indicated their surprise at how much meaning could be obtained from a single sentence that they may have just brushed over otherwise.

As I move forward with this strategy, I am excited by the many possibilities for extension and adaptation in my classroom. Already, I have facilitated the use of the sentence unpacking strategy in small groups, with students analyzing sentences from their own expert group articles. I also see the possibility for supporting my students in using the strategy independently, stopping to unpack and analyze sentences that they find challenging in books they read or on passages on tests. As my students and I gain fluency using the strategy, I have been able to get the time spent going through the process down to 25 minutes, or half of what it took us the first time. This has been accomplished because I have focused the discussions of the sentence on fewer, higher leverage chunks and limited the number of objectives for the lesson, going deeper into fewer elements rather than rushing through several. Ultimately, I hope that sentence unpacking can become a valuable and accessible strategy for students to use in comprehending and evaluating any text they encounter.