VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT USING TEXT
This week’s goal:
Teaching of tier two words
Plan:
This week I will choose five tier two words from the
book my tutee and I will read this semester –
A River Runs Wild, by Lynne Cherry.
The words – pollution, industrial, fertile, restore, invention.
I selected these words because I know from our discussion last
week that Justin struggled to decode and read these words, he
does not know their meanings and he cannot spell them.
Action:
(What we will do together)
My tutee, his mother and I will try to guess what we
think the words mean before we begin to read the book.
(What my tutee will do alone)
My tutee will use context clues to try to determine the
meaning of the words. He will look at the sentences
surrounding the words; he will look to see if the author,
Lynne Cherry, gives him any help in figuring out the
words.
(What I must do as a result of my tutee’s
action/inaction)
I will ask Justin to explain how he arrived at each word
meaning, so I can see how he is thinking about the
words as he reads.
(What my tutee and I will do together)
After we read, we will determine if our earlier
guesses made sense; we will talk about why our guesses
did or did not make sense. If necessary, we will
write student-friendly definitions for each word.
(What parents will do to help at home)
Mother will try to provide several opportunities for
Justin to use the words we learned in the upcoming
week.
Suggestions – opportunities can be:
Something they see on TV that connects with the
words, can be in general conversation, can be from
another reading making connections like text-to-self.
Follow up:
(What we will do together)
Next week we will begin our tutoring session with a
discussion of how Justin used the new words during the
past week.
(What my tutee will do alone)
Justin will try to write the words from memory on his
dry erase board. He will pronounce them accurately,
and in his own words tell the meanings. He will then reread a selected section to his mother and me.
This week’s goal:
To show my tutee how writers use special style,
technique and signal words to help us see the meanings
of words they sometimes use
Plan:
This week I will find words and writer’s technique in
the book The Buried City of Pompeii that the writer
Shelley Tanka uses to help us define words we do not
know. E.g., on page 20, Shelley uses definition to help
us understand the word caldrium, a steamy room
heated by hot air that circulates under the floors and
behind the walls.
Action:
(What we will do together)
My tutee, his mother and I will search the text for examples of words
that writers sometimes use to help us define words we do not know.
We will talk about the types of techniques writers use
such as: definitions, examples, comparisons, contrasts
and gist clues in their writing as they define words.
(What my tutee will do alone)
My tutee will look for additional writer’s technique in the examples we
discuss to see if those techniques help him define words he does not
know in the book The Buried City of Pompeii by Shelley Tanka.
(What I must do as a result of my tutee’s action or inaction)
I will check to see if my tutee is correct in his selections
and provide some examples of my own from the text.
(What my tutee and I will do together)
After we read we will determine where the writer’s technique
was most direct or most confusing.
(What parents will do to help at home)
Parents will continue the activity of looking at context
clues to aid vocabulary development.
Suggestions – opportunities can be:
Newspaper articles magazines any written material they
encounter.
Follow up:
(What we will do together)
Next week we will begin our tutoring session with a
discussion about how the context clues activities went.
We will talk about how difficult it was to use writers’
techniques to determine word meaning.
(What my tutee will do alone)
Continue looking for explanations, comparisons and
contrasts, definitions and gist clues in upcoming
reading.
This week’s goal:
Using categorizations to help build vocabulary
Plan:
This week I will demonstrate to my tutee how we can
use categorization to help build vocabulary.
Action:
(What we will do together)
We will discuss categorization and talk about lists of
things we can categorize. We will discuss what would
be the advantage of categorizing things.
(What my tutee will do alone)
My tutee will look around the library and find words,
artefacts, and pictures that can be categorized.
(What I must do as a result of my tutee’s
action/inaction)
I will find out from my tutee why she placed certain
things together and how she labelled each category.
(What my tutee and I will do together)
We will read the book The True Story of the Three Little
Pigs as told by Jon Scieszka. During the reading we will
categorize items listed in the book such as: bunnies,
sheep, pigs and wolf, which we can categorize
under “Animals.”
(What parents will do to help at home)
Parents will try to provide opportunities for the tutee to
use categorization for things on grocery lists, for
example.
Follow up:
(What we will do together)
Next week we will continue to build on the categories
we listed so far.