Today our class was gifted the book Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty. It's a fabulous book that promotes STEM passions for girls, and I was excited to read it to my first graders. Before reading it out loud, I read the book and noticed there was a wide range of vocabulary that they may be unfamiliar. Indeed, after looking up the reading level, it is a level M book, which is typically late second grade to early third-grade reading. On the fly, I listed all the vocab words in the book I thought that students would be unfamiliar with on the board. Once we sat down for the read aloud, I explained that this book has some tricky words and we can use all we know about context clues to figure them out. I read the words out loud and had students raise their hands if they had ever heard of the word before. Then, I read the lists of words a second time and had students raise their hand if they thought they knew what the word meant. It was a very simple formative assessment to see which of these words are in their listening vocabulary compared to their usable and reading vocabulary. The words that no student could correctly define I put a star next to. As we read, I told students to say "Stop!" when they heard a word that was on our list. Once hearing the word, I read it within context a few times and students worked together to create a working definition. Often, I had to slightly alter their definitions, but it was a good first exposure to these advanced vocabulary words. This was a direct instruction strategy to teach vocabulary within context.
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