The good news is that I've had a chance to do some creating. I will be starting context clues with my students next week and I wanted a way to engage them in some fun practice. Once upon a time I found a passage called The Happy Hookiespookie. It was a Halloween story that replaced some of the words with nonsensical silly words and surrounded them with context clues so that students could easily find their meaning. Since I can't seem to find anything else like this, creating passages with silly words has been on my to-do list for ages and what better time to create than an unexpected snow day? I've been busy at work and I've got two passages completed so far. Each passage has silly words in it, and it comes with pages to record the meaning of each word and a graphic organizer to guide students to think about the word, the sentence it appears in, the sentence before it, the sentence after it, and then its meaning. I always feel like we jump right in to the "meat and potatoes" of context clues with challenging vocabulary. I'm hoping this practice will provide a fun and engaging warm-up before we try the vocabulary in context. My plan is to create at least three more passages and then make it a week-long pack, but for now I've got these two available:
The story of a boy whose father is getting ready to return home from a deployment, just in time for his 12th birthday. This one has a tie-in to Valentine's Day too since the main character's birthday is February 14th!
In this passage, Hannah is sad because her best friend is moving away, but her spirits are lifted when Kate moves in next door.
I've got big plans on the weekend agenda, which mostly involves doing all the things that I could've been doing on these last three unexpected days off! :-) Enjoy your weekend!
No comments