Context Clues {Peek at my Week}

Good Sunday evening! It has been a whirlwind weekend, but very enjoyable. I'm ready to jump in to the week, so I thought I'd link up with Jennifer at Mrs. Laffin's Laughings and share a few of the big things we've got going on this week. 

First, and most importantly (for the kiddos) it is homecoming week and we have our first field trip on Thursday! Needless to say, there will be a lot of extra excitement around these parts this week! 

We are working on context clues, so I'll be reading Baloney (Henry P.) as our mentor text this week. 

Last year was the first time I'd used this book and my students LOVED it, so I'm really looking forward to sharing it tomorrow. 

We will also be doing a few lessons from this great Scholastic book I picked up during one of their $1 sales. 

I've saved the best for last - I'm using interactive notebooks for the first time this year and I am really diggin' 'em! I ran across this great context clues interactive notebook resource on TPT and knew it would be just perfect for our study this week. You can click on the picture below to check it out. 

What do you have planned this week? 

Context Clues {Tried it Tuesday}

Last week we talked about context clues AGAIN. Anyone else have kiddos that just can't seem to get the hang of this? 

This time I had my students write sentences that contained context clues. I had students work with their talking partner on this activity. I created a list of 8 words before the lesson (previous vocabulary words) and pairs chose their word from that list. Each pair was assigned a specific type of clue to use in their sentence and they got to work! 

I had never really considered reversing the roles and having students do the writing, but I do think it made them more conscious of how and when authors use context clues in their writing. It was a bit challenging for them at first because it caused them to think in a new way, but we worked on it for two short mini-sessions and they finally got the hang of it. This is definitely an activity I'll do next year when I introduce context clues and then continue to build on it from there. 





Here are the anchor charts we created after the activity. They came up with some decent sentences considering this was their first time. 















The idea (and others we did throughout the week) came from this book from Scholastic.

I'm liking up with Holly at Fourth Grade Flipper for another wonderful Tried it Tuesday!