This episode of Fuel Up explores Language Dives in EL Education — what they are, why they matter, and how teachers can implement them without feeling overwhelmed. The hosts are joined by first grade teacher Kelly Fuller, who shares her journey from feeling "clunky" with language dives to confidently using them to build student understanding.
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Overview - Language Dives in the K-8 Language Arts Curriculum
It opened my eyes as to just
the precision of these words. It just draws out that knowledge and connects it to the sentence, and when you put it back together, I felt like a deeper understanding. We will sometimes do hand signals, things to show the meaning of a word.
We're using our arms and just kind of encompassing everything. And the wings are flapping there, you know? So we're thinking, everyone, everybody's a little bird now, right? We all have wings.
Welcome back to fuel up a place for conversations with and for those using el education as a resource to support k5 literacy learning, we are so excited to have you with us for this week's episode. Today we zoom in on the topic of language dives. We hope today's talk serves as a pit stop, a chance to swing by for some fresh energy, insights, encouragement and celebration as we work together to do what's best for our learners, this is a chance to fuel up. So wherever this finds you today, we hope you are able to pull over, take a breath and crank it up, and in that spirit, here we go.
Hey everybody, thank you for joining us today. We are diving into a topic today that doesn't get much attention. Language dives.
Even saying those two words may make your face cringe a bit.
We've seen those faces, and that is why Katie and I thought we would bring the topic to the table and talk about it today. Our hope is to define the what, the why and the how around language. Dives. Katie, you ready for this? I'm ready. It's gonna be a fun one today. All right, here we go. And as Katie and I were prepping for this conversation. One word that popped to the surface was deconstruct. And to be honest, it made me think of something I had to do at my house recently. So back in the fall, we had a big wind storm that came through Michigan, and I live at the top of this hill, and out the back of my house are lots of trees. And in the middle of the night, I hear this loud boom, and I'm like, I think our tree went down. And actually, to my surprise, when I woke up in the morning, one tree fell and hit another tree and another fell. So it was like this domino of two large oak trees down in my backyard. Oh no, which is an oh no, and it's also a Oh yeah, sure, because it's the chance to get off the chainsaw, you know? So I went into my shed, got my chainsaw out, and before I went down to start doing some work, I had to do a little deconstructing. Oh, so you know, if you've ever worked with a chainsaw, you can take the pieces off and clean out the chain and just, you know, get it all oiled and lubed up so it's running smoothly. And to be able to pause and kind of take it apart and look at the guts and the stuff inside is kind of cool. I will take your word for the chainsaw being really cool when you take it apart. If I would do that, I don't think it would give back to it, maybe, but I'm glad that's good project for you and you were able to deconstruct and reconstruct. Yes, and listen, it might not be a chainsaw for you, but my hunch is something in your life you have seen or maybe participated in deconstructing something like, what has that been for you? Yeah. So just recently, my five year olds, they just turned five, and got a lot of gifts. Okay, so Max is really into army men, and so he's been having fun deconstructing them and perhaps reconstructing them into
not army men. Is this like Lego, like little Lego piece, like Legos, where you can take the pieces, think, like GI Joe, they have arms and legs that have. You can kind of pop them off. Okay? So he's been really interested in taking them apart. How do you put them back on? What happens if I put the leg onto the arm? And so we have some army monsters in our house. He has definitely figured out that he can make many things from deconstructing those way to go Max. I know I mean army monsters that
did something so.
Wow, that's been fun. Well,
in this theme of taking things apart and putting them back together, we're going to be talking about, as we said, language dives today. And there may be somebody out there who
is using this resource, and if they were honest with us or with themselves, they might say language type, what? Maybe they aren't sure what it is, or they've seen it, maybe haven't implemented it, but just seeing those two words are like, I really don't know what that is. So Katie, let's take a minute to get grounded. What is a language dive and what are some of the benefits of doing them? Yeah, absolutely. So language dives help students understand how English language works. During a language dive, the teacher and students slow down for 1020, minutes to have a conversation about the meaning, purpose and structure of compelling sentences from a complex text. Each language dive conversation follows a deconstruct, reconstruct and practice routine. Students break down sentences into chunks to analyze meaning, then put them back together. It allows for deeper conversations around complex language structures and academic vocabulary or figurative language, yeah.
So really, it's exactly what we did with the chainsaw and army men, kind of right. We're just a little bit with a sentence. We are taking a sentence and kind of pulling it apart and studying it like it with magnifying glasses and talking about it. I mean, the conversation sounds like it's a big part of this work with the intent that we better understand how language works, absolutely, and it's really like you said, the conversation and helping with that building of language and background knowledge, which el does. So great anyway. So that's where we're going today, and to make this conversation even better, we have the perfect guest to add to the table. Katie and I have had the chance to get to know her over the last year or so, and in the words of her literacy coach, she is an amazing teacher. A big welcome to Kelly Fuller, hey, Kelly, hi. How are you doing good? Thank you for being here today. Kelly teaches first grade at Oak Ridge, lower elementary, and it is so good to have you here, and we're gonna warm up with some fun questions. Kelly is a listener, so I think she knows what's coming. She sure does. You want to take the first one? I would love to Well, Kelly, again, thank you for being here and as a listener. You know what I'm going to ask, but what is your go to snack or drink to fuel you up and get you moving?
I love snacks.
Big topic here, my special snack, though, is beef jerky. Anytime we go on a on a road trip, I have to have that. I can make do with other things sometimes, but that's my special treat. Do you? Is it like, homemade jerky or no, not picky. I don't eat a lot of jerky. So like, what's the go to brand like, what's your favorite? What's on sale? So
not picking any jerky. I like jerky. We haven't talked about food on our table recently, but I think we need to add that. I think so too. Yeah, so beef jerky. That's come up twice now. We went out to Massachusetts. Somebody wanted that on the airplane, so maybe that's a hint. We need to get some beef jerky. Well, that's a special one, right? That's a special treat. Yeah, that's a good one. We'll add that maybe next time we'll have some.
And speaking of being fueled up, Kelly, what song would you crank up to the max to fuel you up and launch your day?
Oh, my goodness, there are so many songs I listen to the radio in the car with my kids, and so we listened to a lot of classic tunes from their childhood, right from the 2010s
so one of those songs is Owl City, When can I see you again? That I always, I always enjoy that one. That's a good one. Owl City, When can I see you again. Okay, so Katie, you and I were pulling that up and cranking that on the stereo on the way home today. So
all right, well, now that we are fueled up with our beef jerky and some good tunes, we are ready to dive into our topic for the day. And so let's dive into language dives. Let's do it. I like that. Kelly, we have had a number of conversations about language dives, and just as Katie and I have talked with you in the past, it was like, Man, she is such a good person to just help us flesh this out. Because, as we said earlier, my hunch is we have a number of listeners who
have never done them, or maybe.
They've tried and they felt messy and clunky, and so have kind of given them up and put them to the side. And so it's going to be, I think it's going to be so good for our listeners, just to hear your experience, but to get things started speaking to just your experience. How many years have you been teaching and how many years have you been using and involved with El education as a resource for literacy instruction. Oh, thank you. I This is my 29th year teaching at Oh, yeah, getting there. And this is my second year teaching El, okay. I've been through a lot of different curriculums, and this El curriculum has been a fun, fun one to get into, and this is year two. Year two. Yeah, we're doing it
when you So think back to your first year, when you first began el and you did this work. You know, with your district, what was your experience with language dives.
When you say that people, some of your listeners, are thinking it's clunky. That was my first experience. My first experience doing it was I knew in our district we needed to teach they always are like, teach it with fidelity. So we're doing everything by the book. We're doing everything that the book tells us to do. And so I got into the lesson. I'm opening my book, I'm got out of my lap reading through it, and then it says to go to the language dial. So I got to grab a different book that has a different script in it, and had my sentence strips made up ahead of time. And it was just, it just felt like there was a lot to it. I didn't quite know how it was supposed to go. I wasn't quite sure that I did it right,
but I went through it because that was our goal, to
teach it with fidelity, do all the script. Yeah, so at the beginning part of it felt clunky with the organization of it. Yes, like and that's not our fault as educators, like it was. It's kind of between two different books, and you have this script, and we're trying to follow it along, maybe for the first time, and it feels clunky for us, but yet we're the ones delivering with students, and we have this on sentence strips, and it just kind of feels awkward. And when we feel awkward or we feel clunky, it just isn't always the best feeling. That's exactly right. Just felt odd. It took a little bit longer. And the lessons that first year, the lessons already take a little bit longer. Yes, right? And so then adding that in, it just felt
Do I have time for this? Time is a consideration too, like not just the time to implement it, but the time to plan for it, and when it and when it feels like I'm trying to gather all this stuff and I have other things to do, like it could be easy to say, I'm just gonna set this to the side. Might be the first to go right, but kudos for you to saying our district has asked us to do with this with fidelity, and I'm jumping in, even if it feels messy, I'm gonna jump in and just see what I notice.
So it did feel clunky and messy, but you're here today, you're excited about the language types. So what changed for you? I am here today, and I'm still doing language dives, and that's exactly true. A couple of things changed for me. I had got the opportunity last year to go to the MRA conference and hear a speaker, and that person was talking about implementing new curriculum. And I thought, she's talking to me, you know, I'm implementing a new curriculum, and talked about how we do implement with fidelity that very first year. And again, I thought, That's me. That's what I'm doing. And she said, Well, the second year you implement with integrity, so
as long as you're teaching the curriculum and you're not compromising what the intention of the curriculum is,
that that's okay. You're doing what you need to be doing. So that focus on being able to maybe not trade between books and worry about saying every word in the script and that kind of thing. And that I can still be teaching with integrity and doing what the curriculum intends there, and giving that purpose the reason they put in, and they're still still getting to that,
that that's okay. So the first thing that right? So the first thing that really changed for you is almost that freedom to say, I can do the essence of this. I know what they're asking me to do without reading the script verbatim, exactly. And the second thing I wish everybody had a chance to see that was that I came to the one, one of the monthly meetings that we're fortunate enough to have here at the ISD last year that you and Kevin,
the two of you did a great job with that, but I got to see Kevin do a language dive, and he said, You know, I'm going to take 10 minutes and we're going to sit around this sentence and we're going to deconstruct it and put it back to.
Other again, and you just made it seem so accessible that I thought, I can go back and I can do this too,
seeing it in action. I mean, we talked about this in the previous episode with Jackie about, you know, sometimes for students learning targets on a paper, they are just words on a paper. But when we provide students with models and we say, this is a visual picture of what we're shooting for that is so empowering to kids, and it's that same way for us as educators and for you to when we gathered everybody around this table and listen, I'm the first to say. I'm not the pro at language types either, but I'm willing to jump in and get messy with it. And we gathered around the table with a chart paper and these sentence strips, and we jumped in and had conversations around it. And for you, just seeing it in action made it feel reasonable and attainable. That's exactly right, if you can recall. I mean, that was last year, so you think back at that experience from last year. What were some of those things that were a has for you? So number one, you said, Let's gather around this table, and I don't have this big whiteboard. I don't have the sentence strips, but I do have chart paper, so I'm going to write the sentence right on the chart paper. And you did, it was, I'm not sure exactly what grade level, but it was about seeds and growing plants.
And you wrote it on on there. And you then you said, Okay, we're going to deconstruct. We're going to look at each chunk of the sentence. We're going to take a look at it and around each each part of the sentence, as we talked about it. You were making, you know, pictures. If it's talked about plants, you're like, oh, plants. What are plants? And, you know, we shared out what we thought, and you just made some quick sketches or quick notes around the words, and went through this the sentence just chunks words at a time, and
it opened my eyes as to just the precision of these words and that it is a great sentence that it gets to the point of the unit that it it just draws out that knowledge and connects it to the sentence, and when you put it back together, it it made sense,
the same way that it made sense, but a deeper, I felt like a deeper understanding of the sentence that you just took apart on paper, And then we put it together again. Yeah, I think it was a second grade sentence. I don't remember exactly the sentence either, but I think seeds would be from the pollinators unit in grade two.
And man, what a great reminder that you can vary the tools you use. Yes, you could use it on sentence strips, you can do it on a board. You can use on chart paper, as we did, but the thing that you highlighted was making our thinking visible, like when we got to some of those words and we were talking about vocab, to just sketch a picture of it so kids could connect that and see it and underlining things. And you know, when we had conversations with some of the students, like notating some of that around the sentence parts that when we did reconstruct the whole thing, they had all those notes of our conversation to help them make sense of the sentence as we put it back together. Yes, we just did a language and I have just like that in our classroom recently, in my classroom, and we're doing a birds unit, first grade, mod three, and the sentence is, all of them have wings, and most can fly. And what it's this language drives a little different. It's got some picture icons that the kids get to use, so we pass those out. And just our driving question for this unit is, what makes a bird a bird, right? And so
listening to that sentence, all of them have wings, and most can fly for me, I I know that, right, but breaking that down with my kids and thinking all every single one, right? They all have wings, and what is, what are wings like? I know that. Do they understand that? And we talked about and in their icon, it's an addition sign, right? So we get to connect that back to and that means we're putting it together with this other part. These two parts go together.
Most, okay, what is most? It's not all, right, almost all, nearly all, not quite all, can fly. So wait a minute, right? They all have wings, but they can't all fly. Almost all of them can fly.
And even just with the plus symbol being the and when we reconstructed that sentence, putting it back together. They in math. We can switch partners, right? We can move them one. You know, three plus five is the same as five plus three and lo and behold, we can do that with a sentence as well, right? So that connecting word, that fanboy, they're excited.
That they can now do that in their writing too. They can switch things around.
Wow. What a great connection. And as I was listening to you, kind of a theme that was coming out on some things that changed for you, is really putting yourself in the kids shoes. So when you were watching Kevin model it. You were really a student. And then when you're looking at that lesson again, you're thinking, what do my six, seven year olds need to know that they might not and not thinking through the teacher lens. I know what this means, but really thinking about it through that kid lens, exactly. Now, when I do the language dives, because I'm still doing them, right, my outlook is different, right? I am thinking about what they're getting from it. My English language learners, I think the word them, you know, what does them mean in the sentence?
And why do we know it means birds, right? Because the sentence before was that, but I don't have to say birds, birds, birds, birds, birds. All the time.
The practice of taking a sentence, pulling it apart and studying it, is good for all of our kids, and it's especially important for our English language learners, our multilingual learners. We talked a little bit about that with Rebecca a few episodes ago. And for you to name that, like in the population of the students in your classroom, you're like, Kevin, I have some of those ELL students or multilingual students, and this is really especially good for them. And the other thing that keeps coming to my mind as you talk is just engagement. Makes me think about some of the things Jackie and I talked in the previous episode about setting kids up as investigators and detectives, and in a way, it's like giving them these special plastic classes and saying, Okay, we're going to put these on and we're detecting and investigating this sentence. Let's look at the small parts of this word, because some people might wonder like, why are we taking one sentence and breaking it apart? You are diving into this piece of the language and how it works in the vocabulary and in the order, and how you connected it to math, like, will it change if we split these, if we if we flip these two parts? Oh, it does, and sometimes it doesn't. And just getting kids to really dive into how language works. The heart of it is the conversation that we have with our learners around all these different pieces, and notating that for them to see that, so that they can go back and they get into their own text and their own grading, and they're like, oh, yeah, I get to these complicated sentences. I know how to tackle these.
And my hunch is the
person who wrote this book, I've used this text a number of times, and hopefully the author is not listening, but like we're not going to be how be able to have conversations about language often with Junie B Jones, right? And we're into chapter books like that. That's why
our mentor text, where these sentences come from, are complex text. Katie and I've talked about complex text because we need that. These are the texts we can have some great conversations around language and the vocab and the order of the words. Yeah, there's probably some, you know, complex language sentences and structures in June B. But you know, if we're having conversations around text in that type of genre category might not be able to have the rich conversations we can with some of the texts that we have set as mentor text. And it does build, I think, a deeper understanding of the topic, which goes back to that driving question, and really is what the whole unit is about,
that connectivity, right is important. So it builds on the vocabulary from the module, it builds on the driving question, and it's building that background knowledge for them. I also feel like it puts them on the same playing field all kids. We're doing this for all kids, and not assuming that kids know what this means. Yes, yeah, you
talked a little bit about how this practice has changed for you.
Like you are more intentional about maybe the materials you use, whether it's an anchor chart or sentence strips. You're more intentional about how you capture the thinking of the class with notes and pictures. And you know, even as you talk about it, our listeners can't see but you always smile about it when you talk about it when you talk about it. And that's not always true. Well, that's not most of the time. True dives, you know, because, yeah, the scripts and where they show up can be kind of clunky, as we said earlier.
Talk for a minute about
what it looks like specifically for your room, like you did one a week ago. I think it was last week. Paint us a picture for you. What does it look like to implement a language dive in your classroom? Where are you? Where are the kids? What tools do you use? Like, what does it look like for you? Okay, so.
Normally I would have the kids up on the rug, and I have found for me, this is just kind of a grab and go thing. They're in the slides for the
in the El slides. So when I'm in the slides, when I click it, puts that first chunk up, and I just display it right on my board. Okay? And we can write right on the board around it then. And so it pops up each little chunk. My kids are there, and we go over it. And sometimes, as we discuss the word, I'll make notes. Sometimes I'll let a kid come up and have a student in my room who loves to like, I'm gonna come up and show you, and can make a note right next to it, whatever we will sometimes do, arm or hand signals, things to show the meaning of a word. When we did all have wings, right? We're using our arms and just kind of encompassing everything, and the wings are flapping there, you know. So we're thinking, everyone, everybody's a little bird now, right? We all have wings, and
so we're doing that can slide in the next, the next little chunk. And so just for me,
not worrying now about
the script, pulling that over. I'm not worrying about the sentence strips right, just sliding those right across my board when I'm done, it's, you know, I can pull down my my screen and continue to go in the lesson.
So really, using technology in utilizing the slides for that piece has helped you. And then the engagement piece, you're sharing the pen with some of your students right to make those notes so all kids are able to participate and engaged with that conversation through technology and with the vocab. Like, what a smart move to bring in our whole body movements. We're talking about all let's, let's get engaged. We're in it, like, where our hands are up and we're encompassing whatever motion it is to show that all of us are in
a smart move definitely helps with that engagement piece.
And you, when I watched you do it, you said we're gonna do this in 10 minutes. So I tell my kids that too,
we're gonna do this. We're gonna take 10 minutes. We're gonna look more deeply just at this one sentence. I think it's going to help us understand our driving question a little bit better, and we're going to just see what we can learn from the sentence. 10 minutes, setting purpose, right purpose, for why you're doing it, and also a timeframe, because this could get away from you. And I think that's some of the things that I hear when I talk to teachers. This is another 20 minutes, and I'm already doing 60 minutes. And so I think that's a really helpful set a timer 10 minutes and be done. So
I had that modeled for me, and it's great. Works really well. We all have that tension, right as teachers, how we balancing our time? And yeah, if the heart of these is the conversation we have with our learners, and we're a really good conversation when we all just want to jump in and keep going for another 10 to 20 minutes. But what a smart intention to move. On your part to say, Okay, I'm putting this in the context of my entire day, and I'm keeping this to 10 minutes. And if I have a few minutes later and I want to circle back, I can, but you know what? I am going to honor the rest what else is going on in the space today, and I'm going to keep it to 10. And so yes, if you are listening, you have permission to do that too. Be mindful of the time. So Kelly just gave a great reminder on that. Kelly, you painted such a good picture of what it could look like for somebody to implement this. And I think that kind of brings us to the next part, small steps. So Kelly, as you think about our listeners, some who may be jumping into El education for the first time, others who have been using this resource for a while, you can invite them to be mindful of one thing when working with language dives. What small step would you invite them to consider
one thing that I think is important is to not get hung up on the script and just to keep the purpose of it in mind, which is just to deconstruct that sentence and reconstruct it to help students build that understanding. And if you're not sure what that looks like.
Go in and see somebody do it, whether it's a colleague, or
on the El videos there, those are accessible or the IST. The El does have a great they have a number of them that show sample language types and action. We'll link that Katie and I will link that in our show notes today. And if you happen to be an amazing building with an amazing teacher like Kelly and she is right next door, knock on the door and visit. She's gonna be busy.
We are in each other's rooms all the time. So, you know, get in the habit be brave.
And say, can, can, can I see you do it, or can you can watch me give me feedback. Let's brainstorm this thing together, because our hope for today is to make it less scary, simplify it, make it reasonable, and you can do it. You can do it absolutely, and we're going to close things off today with high fives and hitchhikers. Here's the cool thing, we have the power to re energize and refuel those around us. So find a colleague. It could be the person next door, it could be the person across the hall, maybe it's in another grade. Find that colleague and give them a high five. Tell them you got this. Remind them you're a rock star and pick them up as a hitchhiker. Invite them to join the conversation and take a seat with us at the table.
All the best here and see you next time on fuel up.