Teaching Vocabulary Strategies With Awesome Mentor Texts
There are so many vocabulary strategies for us to teach our primary students! Let’s talk about how using mentor texts can help you teach your students and cultivate their ability to apply vocabulary strategies independently!
When I teach vocabulary strategies, I model thinking through identifying unknown word and finding the definition in the context of books.
Picture Books Suggestions for Teaching Vocabulary Strategies
- Dinosaur Lady
- Weather Words and What They Mean
- True Colors! The Story of Crayola
- For The Right To Learn
- The Story of Simone Biles
- This Is How We Do It
When picking the perfect mentor texts for your lessons, make sure to consider your students’ interests and reading levels so that the book is captivating and accessible to them!
Tips for Picking a Vocabulary Mentor Text
- You want to make sure to identify the type of words and the vocabulary strategy that you want to teach.
- What is your priority & goal of the lesson?
- Is it the process of defining word? learning new words to create background knowledge?
- What type of words are you going to focus on?
- subject specific content words
- emotions
- adjectives
- random words in high interest book
- specific part of speech
Make sure you decide on those two things before you start previewing books. This will help you to quickly and easily imagine your lesson and think alouds while reading through books to know which is the best for your vocabulary strategies lesson!
After students understand the process and importance of identifying vocabulary in the context of books, it is time to move onto applying the skill independently! In my teaching vocabulary resource I offer a variety of passages and practice activities that are differentiated to meet your learners’ ability levels. It is really important that students are applying word solving strategies to text that they are able to read independently in order to master the skill.
More mentor text ideas for teaching non- fiction reading strategies:
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