What Makes a Sentence: The Naming Part and the Telling Part
A 30-minute grammar lesson for the youngest grades on what makes a group of words a sentence: a naming part and a telling part, tested by whether the words tell a whole idea rather than by where the capital is.
Grammar
Subject
Grades K-1
Grade Level
30 minutes
Duration
Sentences
Topic
On this page: Materials · Warm-Up · Direct Instruction · Guided Practice · Independent Practice · Assessment · Closure · Related Resources
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
- Say whether a group of words tells a whole idea
- Find the naming part of a sentence — who or what it is about
- Find the telling part — what they did or what they are
- Add a missing part to make a group of words into a sentence
- Put mixed-up words back into an order that makes sense
Materials
- Complete Sentences Worksheet — one copy per student
- Identifying Adjectives Worksheet, for students who finish early
- Sentence Scramble Worksheet Generator, for unlimited extra practice at your own level
- Word cards — one word per card, enough for pairs to build three or four sentences
- Two hoops, boxes, or chalk circles on the floor, labeled Naming Part and Telling Part
Vocabulary
- Sentence — a group of words that tells a whole idea
- Naming part — who or what the sentence is about
- Telling part — what they did, or what they are
- Whole idea — enough words that you are not left waiting for more
- Word order — the order words go in so a sentence makes sense
Preparation
Write the word cards in advance and make the naming parts and telling parts obviously different colors — naming parts in one, telling parts in another. At this age the color is doing real work: a child can see the shape of a sentence before they can read one.
Mark the two hoops or circles on the floor and leave them there for the whole lesson. Children who physically stand in the naming part remember it in a way that no diagram on a board achieves.
Have a handful of deliberately incomplete groups ready, and make some of them long. The long-but-not-a-sentence example is the one that does the teaching, so do not let them all be two words.
Warm-Up
4 minutes. Say three groups of words out loud and ask the class to give a thumbs up if it sounds finished: The dog barked. — Under the big red table. — She jumped.
They will get all three right by ear, and quickly, which is the point of doing it out loud first. Children can hear a complete sentence long before they can explain one.
Ask why the middle one felt unfinished. Somebody will say they were waiting to find out what happened. Take that answer and hold on to it — it is the definition the whole lesson is built on, and it came from them.
Direct Instruction
8 minutes. Put a sentence on the board and cut it in half with a line: The dog | barked. Name the two halves. The naming part says who or what. The telling part says what they did. A sentence needs both, and that is the test.
Now do the two failures on purpose, one at a time. Put up The big brown dog. and ask what is missing — there is a naming part and nobody ever finds out what the dog did. Then Ran across the garden. — there is a telling part and nobody knows who ran.
Put the long one next to a short one and let the class compare: In the park after school against She ran. Ask which is a sentence. Some will pick the longer one, and this is exactly where you want that belief to surface. Six words that leave you waiting are not a sentence; two words that tell a whole idea are.
Say what the punctuation does and does not do. A capital at the front and a mark at the end are how we dress a sentence up for the page — they do not make it one. Show The big brown dog. again, correctly punctuated at both ends and still not a sentence, and let that land.
Finish on word order. Put the words of a sentence up jumbled and fix them together. Say the rule plainly: the words have to be in an order that makes sense, and it is not enough just to have the right ones.
Guided Practice
8 minutes. Bring the hoops out. Hand each child a word card and call small groups up to stand in the right hoop — naming parts in one, telling parts in the other. Then pair one from each hoop and read the sentence they have made out loud, however silly it turns out.
The silly ones are useful. The teacher plus hopped away is a perfectly good sentence and the class laughing at it is the class recognizing that it works, which is the target.
Then pairs at tables, with three jobs:
- sort their word cards into naming parts and telling parts
- build two sentences and read them aloud
- build one group of words that is NOT a sentence, and say which part is missing
The third job is worth more than the first two. Making a broken one on purpose means knowing what the pieces are, and a child who can do it stops producing them by accident.
Circulate with one question: does that tell a whole idea, or are we still waiting?
Independent Practice
6 minutes. Students work the Complete Sentences worksheet alone.
Add one thing to it: pick any sentence on the page and draw a line between the naming part and the telling part. It takes ten seconds per sentence and it shows you whether the child is applying the test or recognizing familiar sentences, which look identical on a tick-the-box page.
Assessment
2 minutes. Three items, read aloud, thumbs up or down. Is this a sentence? The cat sat on the mat. Is this a sentence? Went to the store. Then: fix that last one so it is a sentence.
The third item is the one that discriminates. Spotting an incomplete group can be done by ear; repairing it means knowing which part is missing, and that is the difference between hearing a sentence and understanding one.
Closure
2 minutes. Go back to Under the big red table from the warm-up and ask the class to finish it. Take three or four versions. Close on the test, in the words the class gave you at the start: a sentence tells a whole idea, so you are not left waiting — it needs a naming part and a telling part, both.
Differentiation and Accommodations
- Extra support: stay entirely oral and drop the writing. A child who can hear whether a group of words is finished has the concept, and the writing follows later. The end punctuation worksheet, free with a member account, is the gentler companion page.
- Extension: stretch a working sentence rather than making more of them. Identifying adjectives turns The dog ran into The big brown dog ran, and the sentence scramble generator makes unlimited word-order puzzles from sentences you type yourself.
- Common difficulty: the child who calls anything with a capital and a period a sentence. Give them The big brown dog. punctuated perfectly at both ends and ask what the dog did. They find the hole themselves, which works far better than being shown it.
- Watch for: a naming part with no noun in it — a child who writes Ran fast and reads it aloud as though the person is obvious because they are picturing them. Ask who, out loud. Most of the time the naming part exists in their head and simply never made it to the page.
Extension Activities
Common and proper nouns is the natural follow-up, and it is free with a member account — once a child knows the naming part exists, naming what goes in it is the next question they ask.
The capitalization and end punctuation lesson plan is the right sequel a year or so later: this lesson says the punctuation is not what makes a sentence, and that one teaches the punctuation properly once the sentence itself is secure.
Build a sentence a day on the board from cards, with a different child choosing each part. It takes two minutes, and by midterm the naming-part-and-telling-part test is something the class does rather than something they were taught.
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