Ready-to-teach lesson
Make Inferences
Coriander the Contrary Hen - Grade 1 - Short lesson
TIME
OBJECTIVE
18 minutes Work out what four hard words mean from the pages they sit on, and say what the clue was.
Essential question: How can you know a word you have never seen before?
Materials
Text to mark
PRODUCT
A table of words, meanings and clues
- • The book
- • Passage 1 - what contrary means, shown twice
- One table each with the four words filled in
- Passage 2 - the vegetable garden
- Prepared passages: Passage 1, Passage 2, Passage 8, Passage 12
Lesson sequence
1 Launch - 3 min
- Passage 8 - Farmer Bucket loses patience
- Passage 12 - Mrs. Bucket loses patience
- Focus:
- A word explained by two examples
- Teacher direction:
- Read the first page. Ask what contrary means - and when somebody guesses, ask which part of the page told them. The page has given two examples and no definition, which is exactly enough.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 1 2 Teacher model - 5 min
- Teacher model:
- I do it out loud with the word Farmer Bucket uses. He says do not sass me, straight after Coriander has cackled a rude answer at him and while he is telling her off. So sass must mean answering back cheekily. I did not need a dictionary: I needed the sentence before it and the fact that he is cross. cross.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 8 3 Four words from the pages - 10 min
- Focus:
- The clue, not just the meaning
- Teacher direction:
- Using Passages 1, 2, 8 and 12, work out what contrary, sass, flippant and discourteous mean, and write down the clue you used for each.
page 1
- Expected answer:
- Contrary means doing the opposite of what you are asked - the page proves it by showing her told to go and staying, and told to stay and going, and again in the garden, where being told not to dig makes her dig up the peas and eat the lettuce. Sass means answering back cheekily; Farmer Bucket says do not sass me immediately after she has cackled at him. Flippant means much the same - not taking somebody seriously - and Mrs. Bucket says it in the same place in her telling-off, so the two words are doing the same job. Discourteous means rude, because the book uses it for the reply that gets her told off every time.
- Student product:
- A four-row table: the word, what it means, the clue
- Prepared text:
- Passage 1, Passage 2, Passage 8, Passage 12
Support & extension
Above: Sass and flippant sit in the same place in two different tellings-off. Explain what that tells you about the two words.
Below: Fill the four rows, writing the clue as well as the meaning.
Assessment
- Says contrary means doing the opposite
- Uses the go-and-stay examples as the clue
- Says sass means answering back rudely
- Says discourteous means rude
- Names the sentence that gave the clue for one word
page 2