Description
What our Use of Sentences for Context Clues lesson plan includes
Use of Sentences for Context Clues teaches students how to use sentence-level context clues to determine the meaning of words. At the end of the lesson, students will be able to identify words in sentences that are unfamiliar or unknown, identify sentence-level context clues and use them as a strategy to comprehend unfamiliar or unknown words, and determine the meaning of a word or a phrase from sentence-level context clues. This lesson is for students in 3rd grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the green box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. For this lesson, the supplies you will need are the handouts, pencils, pens, and highlighters. To prepare for this lesson ahead of time, you can gather the supplies and copy the handouts.
Options for Lesson
Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. If you’d like to add another activity to this lesson, you can have students create word cards using the words from the activity or practice worksheets that have the unfamiliar word on one side and an alternate word (found in a Thesaurus) on the back. The students can then shuffle the cards and hold up the unfamiliar word side to their partner; if their partner can guess the definition, they win a point. Student can also show the side with the alternate word for more practice.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page includes a paragraph with additional guidelines and things to think about as you begin to plan your lesson. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
USE OF SENTENCES FOR CONTEXT CLUES LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Mr. Dictionary – Noah Webster
The Use of Sentences for Context Clues lesson plan includes two pages of content. The lesson begins by teaching students about the Merriam Webster dictionary, which a man named Noah Webster wrote, finishing it in 1825. It took him 28 years to write and had 70,000 words and definitions. To this day, the Merriam Webster dictionary is the most popular dictionary.
We aren’t sure how many English words there are in total. This is because we’re constantly adding new words to the English language. Most dictionaries have less than 500,000 words in them, and it’s important to remember that not every English word is in every English dictionary.
Students will then learn that adults typically know less than 10% of all the words in the English language. Most teenagers know about 40,000 words and most adults know about 70,000 words. The more words you learn, the more clearly you’ll be able to express yourself. You’ll also find reading easier. The good news is that we can learn to figure out the meaning of unknown words by using sentence level clues.
To learn what sentence level clues are, we first need to understand what the context is. Context is what comes before and after the unfamiliar word. We can think of it like the background of a photo; it helps us understand what is happening. The lesson provides a picture to use as an example. If you look at the photo, you can learn a lot. The main focus is a road, but we can tell from the background of the photo that it’s winter, because everything is covered in snow. Because the road isn’t paved, we can tell that this is probably a country road. All of these observations are based on the context of the photo. These facts are things that the photographer wants you to know. This is like how we use sentence level context clues to discover the meaning of unfamiliar words. The other words in the sentence are like the background of the photo.
Sentence-Level Context Clues
Sentence level context clues can help you figure out the meaning of unknown words. The lesson includes an example paragraph to illustrate this. In the paragraph, there are two words in bold that we need to figure out the meaning of: witty and humorous. Because the author of the paragraph calls Freddie a clown, and notes that the class laughed, we can deduce that witty and humorous mean funny.
The lesson closes with another example paragraph with the bolded words fierce and ferocious. It asks students to circle the hints in the paragraph that might help them figure out what those two words mean. It also asks students to answer a reading comprehension question about the paragraph. By completing this content page as a class, students will begin to understand how to use sentence level clues to determine the meaning of new words.
USE OF SENTENCES FOR CONTEXT CLUES LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Use of Sentences for Context Clues lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.
DOTTED LINES ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
Students will work with a partner to complete the activity worksheet. Each pair will first cut out the words in the dotted lines on the worksheet. They will then place the word with the nearest meaning to the words in bold in the box. They won’t use all of the words. Finally, they will write one word matching each of the bold words in each box.
Students may work alone or in groups for this activity if you’d prefer.
SENTENCE-LEVEL CLUES PRACTICE WORKSHEET
The practice worksheet asks students to read the provided sentences and explain the meaning of the bold words using sentence-level context clues. They will then read the whole paragraph and explain the meaning of a specific phrase based on the context.
USE OF SENTENCES FOR CONTEXT CLUES HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
For the homework assignment, students will read the provided passage and use sentence-level context clues to write the letter from the word in the Word List next to the word that is closest to its meaning.
Worksheet Answer Keys
This lesson plan includes answer keys for the activity worksheet, the practice worksheet, and the homework assignment. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
