L.7.4 - Word-Solving Strategies: Context Clues & Other Resources

In continuation of yesterday's lesson, we reviewed the use of context clues (words before or after a difficult word) to help a reader come closer to the meaning of an unknown word. Sometimes there aren't context clues to help us or we need to confirm our inferred meaning. One way to do this is to use a dictionary. Students used dictionary.com to check their inferred meaning and refined their understanding with the information provided in the online dictionary. You'll see in the far right column, this student added information that may have been missing from her original guess.

 We have a word wall that will continue to grow as we read more and more into Touching Spirit Bear. We added our own meanings in red next to each vocabulary word to remind us of their definitions while we read. We start Ch. 1 on Monday!

Introducing Touching Spirit Bear: Making Predictions & Using Context Clues (L.7.4)

The Power of Choice: How Do Our Decisions Affect Our Lives and the Lives of Others?

I think middle school students can benefit a lot from learning units in themes. This summer I read Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen, and while the Lexile level is only 670, the themes in the book are complex and are ones that many middle school students will be able to relate to in some way, shape, or form. Life is all about making decisions, learning and growing from them, and transforming to become more of who you really want to be. That is exactly what the main character in this book experiences. The themes of justice, the power of nature, the circle of life, anger and revenge, culture, healing, and forgiveness are ones every human can learn from, especially adolescents. I'm planning to use Touching Spirit Bear, in addition to several non-fiction texts related to topics in TSB, to teach the Common Core Standards my co-workers and I have organized for this quarter. It's the first time I've tried this sort of unit, but I'm excited about the possibilities. I would like to give credit to Erin Grysko, whose unit guide entitled "The Power of Choice: How Do Our Decisions Affect Our Lives and the Lives of Others?" has been one of my co-workers' and my main resources. Thank you for sharing your work with the world!

In previous days, we did a few activities that required students to think about choices and decisions that would prepare them for Touching Spirit Bear and realizing how choices and decisions play a role in ALL our lives. Some of the activities included: playing Would You Rather? , watching video clips of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and The Lion King, listening to the song Cat's in the Cradle. As always, students responded orally and in writing to questions that asked them to reflect on how choices and decisions played a part in each.

Today it was finally time to start getting our hands on Touching Spirit Bear! Today's activities started like this:

 So, that's exactly what my students did - they looked at the cover and made some predictions (inferences) based on the picture clues:

 Here is what one student wrote as a result of that prompt. You'll notice the sentence stems helped him get his thinking started. Sometimes I feel like a few sentence stems are all kids need to get their thoughts going!

Here is another student response:

Students shared their thinking as a whole group, and we created a KWL chart of some things that we KNOW for sure about the book and things we WANT TO KNOW as a result of the cover and back blurb. 

Students recorded the KWL chart underneath their predictions.

In my next class with my students, I introduced some vocabulary from Ch. 1. I modeled using context clues as a word solving strategy by highlighting the clues in each of the example sentences that lead me to make an inference about what the word might mean. I modeled the first two. Students did the rest of them on their own, highlighting the clues in the sentence that led to their inference. This strategy is Common Core State Standard L.7.4. The student learning target is: I can infer the meaning of unknown words using context clues (examples found in surrounding text).

For some words, context clues aren't always an option for word solving, so we used Dictionary.com as an electronic resource to confirm whether our inferences were right. This strategy is Common Core State Standard L.7.4. The student learning target is: I can verify my inferred meaning of an unknown word by consulting general and specialized references (dictionaries).

Students filled in the definition if it was different than their inferences and/or revised their original inferred definition.

RL.7.1 - Make Inferences, Cite Textual Evidence

We zoomed in more heavily on inferring today. Inferring was a 'thinking code' I introduced earlier last week, but it definitely is a skill that needs more attention. I used this chart to anchor what it means to infer.

Textual evidence and background knowledge are essential for inferring. To help students remember to include both when writing about their inferences, I used these sentence stems as prompts. You'll see on the chart that it says "word-for-word support" and "paraphrased support" which are ways to cite text that I taught last week. Refer to this blog post for those anchor charts!

Students did a practice activity on the computer in which I sent them the following passage that I found on this website:
Screech! Karen stomped on the gas pedal the moment the light turned green. She looked over her left shoulder and zigged past a semi-truck. She zoomed ahead and looked over her right shoulder and thenzagged past a motorbike. She glanced at the clock on the console of her vehicle and darted into the parking lot. Whipping into a parking spot, she grabbed her suitcase and ran through the lot, up the escalator, and into the terminal. Her heavy suitcase was smacking and bouncing the whole way. As soon as entered the terminal, she heard an announcement over the loudspeaker, "Final boarding call for flight 205 to JFK..."Karen looked at her ticket and then at the line to get through the security checkpoint, which wrapped around several turnstiles and slithered like a lethargic snake. Karen sighed and then slowly walked to the customer service desk.

I asked two questions that required students to infer. They were:
1. Where is Karen?
2. Why does she walk slowly at the end of the passage?

Here are two student responses for question 1:
* I infer that Karen is at an airport. I think this because the text says she heard an announcement that said it was the final boarding call. From my background knowledge I know that airports will go on the loudspeaker and announce one last time before the plane takes off These are called boarding calls. Therefore, that is how I came to infer that Karen is at an airport.
* I infer Karen is at an airport. I believe this because in the text it says that she was rushing through the terminal and she had a suitcase with her. It also talked about her boarding a flight. From my background knowledge, I know that at airports they have terminals to separate flights and a suitcase is often something people bring to the airport to take on a plane. Therefore, I infer that Karen is at an airport.

Here is a student response for question 2:
* I infer that Karen is walking slowly at the end of the passage because shse probably missed her flight! I infer this because it says the line went all the way down the hall way and "Karen sighed and then slowly walked to the customer service desk". From my background knowledge I know that if someone sighs, it usually means you're disappointed and a line that goes down the hallway means it will take a while to get to the front. That's how I came to infer that Karen missed her flight!