3.2 Explicitly Teach Sentence Expansion

It is important to keep your card parts consistent colors. This is a good support for all students but benefits English Learners in particular by offering a visual cue to assist with the vocabulary. Another strategy for supporting English Learners is to use pictures with the subject and predicate cards.

We sometimes call this type of simple sentence a kernel sentence. Simple sentences are like popcorn kernels that need to expand. When heat is added to a popcorn kernel, it expands and pops open. The kernel is just the start!

We can expand a kernel sentence to make it longer and more elaborate. Expanding sentences helps our readers understand our ideas better and picture them in their minds more clearly.

This is a good place to work on vocabulary by defining elaborate. When something is elaborate it has detail. Using the simple sentence The cat sleeps, you could compare a black and white clip art picture of a cat sleeping to a colorful picture of a cat with more detail.

Today we are going to learn one way to expand our simple sentences. We will do this by answering one or more key questions: When? Where? Why? or How? This allows readers to create a clearer picture in their minds of the action in the sentence.

When we have a simple sentence such as The cat sleeps, it does not tell us much about the sleeping cat. We need to expand our simple sentence to help the reader create a clear picture in their mind of what else we would like to communicate.

Our simple sentence tells us the who and the what. Who is the sentence about? The cat. What is the cat doing? Sleeping. But this simple sentence leaves the reader wanting to know more. We can make a clearer picture in the reader's mind by expanding this sentence.

Answers to these questions add detail. Where does the cat sleep? When does the cat sleep? These details will make a clearer picture in a reader's mind.

Let’s read this expanded sentence aloud together.

Remember, a simple sentence is like a popcorn kernel. It has not expanded yet. To make our sentences pop so they are not just basic sentences, we need to expand our action part (predicate). We expand our simple sentence idea by answering some questions.

One of the first things I am wondering more about as I read that sentence is where does the frog jump? To help my readers, I need to think of places where the frog could jump. I could picture him jumping on a lily pad, into a pond, or on the grass. I am going to choose into the pond. A frog jumps into the pond. I am starting to get a clearer picture in my mind by adding that detail.

Now that we know where the frog jumps, as a reader, I am wondering how it jumped. I'm going to think of ways to describe how it could have jumped.

The frog could have jumped slowly or quickly, but I picture it jumping suddenly. I picture watching a frog, and I don't expect it to jump. The frog jumps suddenly.

I want to know one more piece. Why did the frog jump? When I think about a frog jumping into the pond suddenly, I start to think about why would a frog do this? Maybe the frog sensed danger and needed to hide.

We expanded our simple sentence to be more elaborate. This made a clearer picture in the reader's mind.

Let's practice expanding a simple sentence. On our sheet we have a simple sentence: The owl flew. This sentence has all the pieces we need to make it a sentence. It starts with a capital letter and ends with a stop sign, a period. It also has both a naming part (subject) and an action part (predicate). What is the naming part of our sentence?

The owl flew is a simple kernel sentence that has not been expanded. We are going to answer two questions to make this sentence more elaborate. Our first question is where, and our second question is when.

Now it is time to write our expanded sentence. Our sentence starts with The owl flew, and now you will add Where? and When? to expand your sentence.