Week 8 Post - Vocabulary Development Lesson

If I were to teach a vocabulary lesson using "Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry," I would first teach a mini-lesson on vocabulary.  I would put up a paragraph from "Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry" with a word the students are not familiar with in it, and I would read the text aloud to the students.  I would show the students how they can use context clues to help them find the meaning of a word and demonstrate this using a few paragraphs that contain more difficult words.  I would also show the students how to use a lexical resource, such as a dictionary, but they would see that there are usually multiple meanings to words so it is difficult to figure out which definition we are looking for.  After we had practiced this task as a whole class, I would have the students work in small groups to find meanings of words in "Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry."  Every student would have their own copy of the book, and they would receive a worksheet with the word they are trying to define, a page number, and a blank space for the students to write the definition.  I would take this a little further and have the students determine if the word is a noun, adjective, adverb etc... and then re-write the word in their own sentence.  Having the students use the defined word in their own sentence would act as a post-assessment to the lesson because I would see if the students really understood the meaning of the word or not.  After the lesson, I would post these words up on a word wall in the class so the students would remember them and use them again in their own writing.