Sentence frames + text to table

My class has had a science focus for the week: plants. Our language focuses (or foci for you Latin geeks out there) in addition to the vocabulary of plants (photosynthesis, germination, pollination) has been the language of comparison. I also wanted the kids to learn these "academic" words and be able to use them in conversation: diagram, label, match, title.  So we've asked students to understand what we called "both" sentences and "but" sentences when talking about plants. Yep, it was Venn diagram week in class.

The point, though, is to share here two things. First, sentence frames are a really, really, really useful tool for ELLs. And there seems to be some confusion about what sentence frames are. So here's what they are not: fill-in-the-blank sentences. A FITB sentence has one response. _______ is the President of the United States is a FITB. We only have one president, and you can only put one name in that blank for it to be correct. A sentence frame provides the language structure for an ELL to use. And while it might be context-specific, there should be multiple uses for that frame. A good example from a recent geography lesson in my class: _____________ is to the ____________ of __________. So students would fill in the first and last blank with place names and the middle blank with a directional word. "Kentucky is to the north of Tennessee." It has multiple uses for the kids, and the "glue" words don't change. "Mrs. B's class is to the left of Mr. White's class." "My locker is to the right of Aung Sung's."

Second, I wrote earlier about the text to table to text lesson, and I want to share the progression of that here. So here are a series of pictures from this week:

Working on some germination action here.

The lesson I'm showing pictures from is somewhere near the middle of the unit. The students had already studied a lot about the parts of a a plant and what each part does for the plant. We had also started comparing various plants (to practice using those plant parts) among other things. 

I wanted the students to be able to work with a more complex text by the end of the week, but we started with a sentence-level reading. Students had a blank Venn diagram, and I went through a text and pulled out sentences like, "Apples and peaches grow on trees." or "An apple has many seeds. A peach has one big seed." I then took those individual sentences and put them onto paper where I underlined the key text for them--the text that they would need to transfer to their Venn diagram paper. 

Above, you can see two of my students working on one of those sentence papers. They had to find the appropriate phrase and decide where it belonged on the paper--in the outer circles that indicated that the fruits are "different" or in the inner circle that indicates that they are the "same." 

After students had collected the phrases from the individual sentences in the back of the room, they had to turn those phrases back into comparison sentences using these sentence frames:

Both ___________ and _______________ _________________.

____________ _______________, but ____________ ____________.

Both apples and peaches grow on trees.

Apples have many seeds, but peaches have one big seed. 

Yes, this is close to what they had seen on the papers in the back of the room, but remember that they had only put the phrases on their paper--not the complete sentences. And the sentences were not always worded so closely to the sentence frames. So this was requiring them to re-think the information that they had seen in the back of the room. 

Later in the week, they read this two-page text:

Longman Science

And the kids put together this Venn diagram with minimal support from me (yes, the handwriting is mine--they told me what to write):

And then they took the information from the diagram and turned that into a paragraph comparing animals and plants.

One final use for sentence frames in the unit wrap-up for the week is shown below. I gave the students a list of options for the first blank because I wasn't sure they would know how to say what all we had done over the course of the week, and then I left the second blank open for them to fill in. All the students were able to produce responses that were strong and even used some of the academic language that we had studied this week.