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Lesson Plan
Get Clued In to Context Clues
Context clues are a powerful tool for all readers! Use this lesson to teach your students how to utilize context clues to determine the meanings of unknown words.
Grade
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Learning Objectives
Students will be able to use context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.
The adjustment to the whole group lesson is a modification to differentiate for children who are English learners.
Introduction
(5 minutes)
- Write the phrase Difficult Words on the board and circle it. Ask students to think about what they do when they encounter a difficult word during reading. Record answers around the phrase and circle them to create a concept map graphic organizer.
- Provide feedback about student answers, pointing out the effective strategies all readers should use.
- Read the learning objective aloud, and have the class choral read it. Explain that today’s lesson will teach about good context clues that support a reader in figuring out the definition of new words. Context clues are a skill that readers use to figure out the meanings of unknown words in a sentence. These are found within the same sentence as the unknown words, or they can be found in sentences that come before or after them.
Beginning: Ask students to talk about their strategies with a partner in their home language (L1) or their new language (L2).
Intermediate:
- Provide a student-friendly definition for the word difficult.
- Ask students to summarize the definition of context clues in their own words to a partner, and then to the whole class.