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Learning Objectives
Students will be able to figure out the meaning of unknown words using various strategies and clues.
Introduction
(5 minutes)- Ask, “What do you do when you’re reading and come across a word that you don’t know?” Write a few answers on the board.
Beginning: Pre-teach strategies to understand unknown words in sets of mini-lessons prior to the lesson.
Intermediate: Provide students with a copy of the Read the Word Clues worksheet prior to the lesson and use a simplified text to explicitly cover and explain each strategy.
Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling
(10 minutes)- Read aloud a page of a book to the class. Choose one word that you will work on figuring out the meaning of.
- Briefly review the following strategies for figuring out the meaning of unknown words:
- Where did the word come from? Think about prefixes, suffixes, and root words.
- What would make sense? Use context cues.
- Check in with your senses: Is the mystery word a sensory word?
- Homophones & Homographs: Does the word sound like another word you’ve heard before?
- Synonyms and antonyms: Do you know another word with a similar or opposite meaning?
- Compound word: Is the word made up of smaller words?
- Is it an abbreviation?
- Use the strategies that are most relevant to the unknown word you selected to figure out the meaning of the word.
Beginning: Provide students with the vocabulary word that will be chosen, and a connecting visual, prior to the lesson.
Intermediate: Review important vocabulary words with students prior to the lesson and provide a word bank and visuals to support understanding of strategies.
Guided Practice
(15 minutes)- Have students work with a partner to find a book. Have partners locate a word that they are not sure of the meaning of and use one of the strategies you identified.
- Ask pairs to share their sentence, word, strategy, and the word’s meaning.
Beginning:
- Simplify text.
- Allow student to work in a teacher-led small group, reading the text aloud with support from the teacher.
Intermediate:
- Simplify text.
- Allow students to work in a teacher-led small group, reading the text aloud with support from the teacher.
- Give students access to resources in their home language (L1) including bilingual dictionaries, book, and glossaries.
Independent working time
(20 minutes)- Have students select a book at their reading level. As they read, have students complete the Read the Word Clues worksheet as they identify and figure out the meaning of unknown words.
- Have students complete the Prefix, Suffix, Make Sense of It worksheet when they finish reading.
Beginning:
- Provide a simplified text and allow student to read aloud to a teacher.
- Guide and support student in filling out the context clues worksheet.
- Provide student with the Prefix, Suffix, Make Sense of It worksheet partially filled out.
Intermediate: Allow student to work with a partner and provide a simplified text for the student to refer to.
Differentiation
Support: Highlight the words that students should work to figure out the meaning of.
Enrichment: Have students check their definitions in a dictionary and make their own glossary featuring the words that they encountered.
Assessment
(5 minutes)- Write a few simple sentences on the board. In each sentence, include one word that students probably won't know. Examples include:
- My sister just bought a very unique dollhouse.
- What's the purpose of wearing a helment?
- Can you please disable the fire alarm?
- Give the students a few minutes to figure out the unknown words, using one of the strategies they learned today.
- Call on a few students to explain how they figured out what the unknown word meant and what strategy they thought was the most helpful.
Beginning:
- Provide student with a visual representation of the strategies discussed to paste in a reading log or journal.
- Provide visuals that connect to each of the unknown words and allow students to share the meaning of the word in English and their L1.
Intermediate:
- Encourage the student to create visuals of the strategies that will spark understanding in the future and draw them on the Read the Word Clues worksheet.
- Provide students with the following sentence frames to support them as they share their ideas with peers:
- The strategy I used was ____. I found the strategy helpful because ____. The word ____ means ____.
Review and closing
(5 minutes)- Have students share some of the words and definitions that they worked with during independent work time.
Beginning: Provide students with the following sentence frame to gauge their understanding of strategies to use to figure out unknown words and have them share their finished sentence with a peer or teacher:
- One strategy I can use is ____ which means ____.
Intermediate: Have students do a think-pair-share, answering one of the following discussion prompts:
- I can use ____ to figure out ____.
- A new word I learned was ____. A sentence that includes my new word is: ____.
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