Margin Notes

TRY THIS TOMORROW: WORDS WORKING TOGETHER

Mar
19

In last Thursday’s post, we explored how to use the New York Times’ What’s Going On in This Picture? to help students build sentences from the ground up. By starting with a “Who + Do” chart and expanding with details, students learn how to construct meaning.

But what happens when students encounter a complex sentence in their reading that they didn’t build themselves? To help them navigate this, teachers can turn to a routine from Nancy Lewis Hennessy’s The Reading Comprehension Blueprint.

While the previous routine focused on sentence construction, this script focuses on sentence deconstruction. It teaches students to ask specific questions to unlock the meaning of sentences they encounter in their texts.

The Routine: Words Working Together by Nancy Lewis Hennessy

Each word in a sentence has a job. Each is a building block of meaning. We have learned that words answer different questions about the sentence, such as who or what it is all about. Let’s review how these words can answer questions about the meaning of the sentence.

  1. Let’s read this sentence from your text: ________________
  2. Let’s find the words in the sentence that answer these questions (adapt questions to targeted sentence):
    • Which word(s) answers the question who or what? ________________
    • Which word(s) tells us what the who/what was doing? ________________
    • Which word(s) tell us about the who or what?
      • What kind? ________________
      • How many? ________________
      • Which one? ________________
    • Which words tell who did what (to whom)? ________________
    • Which words tell you
      • When? ________________
      • Where? ________________
      • How? ________________
  3. (Note: Partners each have a set of word cards and a structured organizer with questions.) These words all come from sentences in your text. Your job is to match the word with the question it answers. I will do one with you. The word ________________ answers the question ________________. Let’s try one together. The word ________________ answers the question ________________. It is your turn to match the rest of the word cards with the questions.
  4. Let’s check our work. Listen or look as we review the completed organizer. (Complete orally or on whiteboard.)

This routine is the perfect follow-up to the Who + Do image practice. In the image routine, students learn that adding “how, when, and where” details makes their writing more precise. In the Teacher Syntax Script, they learn that those same details are the keys to comprehending what an author has written.

By teaching students to identify how phrases and clauses contribute to meaning, we give them a “way in” to complex text. Instead of getting stuck on a difficult sentence, they can systematically break it down into its functional parts and rebuild the meaning for themselves.

Hennessy, Nancy Lewis. The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text. Brookes Publishing, 2021.

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