The 7-Week Word Parts unit is composed of 21 lessons. Students work with three types of words that can be divided into meaningful parts: compound words, prefixed words, and suffixed words.

During the first five weeks, instruction cycles between teaching students the meanings of individual prefixes/suffixes and having students apply the Word Parts Strategy to unknown words with the prefixes/suffixes most recently learned. The unit culminates at the end of Week 6, when students read a story that contains unknown words with both prefixes and suffixes. Week 7 is devoted to review and testing.

Unit Overview

This table (pdf) provides a summary of all the Word Parts lessons.

Posters

The posters provide a focus and a reminder about critical concepts.

Sample Lesson

In this lesson (pdf), students learn about strategies and are introduced to the WLS program.

Sample Quiz

Students take this quiz (pdf) at the end of Week 4, after working with compound words and 10 prefixes. The quiz contains both knowledge and application questions.

Sample Activity

Students use this activity to learn the meanings of suffixes.

Sample Story

Students apply the Word Parts Strategy to the unknown prefixed words in this story (pdf), which explains how Enfracta became a superhero.

The Context Unit has 15 lessons taught over a five-week period. Students learn the Context Strategy during the first week, and after that, they apply the strategy while reading texts of increasing difficulty. Early on, they work with texts that have strong clues, such as definition and synonym clues, which provide a clear idea of word meaning. Then they progress to texts with contrast and antonym clues. These texts are more difficult to interpret because they require students to think about how things are different, rather than how they are the same. Finally, students work with general clues, which are the most difficult because they give only a hint of meaning. After students have had three weeks of practice with various types of clues in both contrived and authentic text, during Week 4 they learn to use the Context and Word Parts Strategies at the same time. The unit concludes in Week 5 with a review lesson and a test.

Unit Overview

This table (pdf) provides a summary of all the Context lessons.

Posters

The Context Unit includes two posters: The Context Strategy poster and the Context Clues poster.

Sample Lesson

In this lesson (pdf), students are introduced to the context strategy.

Sample Quiz

After two weeks of work with the Context Strategy, students take this quiz (pdf).

Sample Activity

In this activity (pdf), students apply the Context Strategy to authentic text: an excerpt from The Wizard of Oz.

Sample Story

At the end of Week 4, students apply the Word Parts and Context Strategies to infer the meanings of the unknown words in this article (pdf) about American cinema.

For students to successfully use the Dictionary Strategy, they must be skilled at reading every word of all the definitions in the dictionary they are using and at choosing the correct word for the context. In the Dictionary Unit, they practice those skills in a variety of ways while reading both narrative and expository text.

Unit Overview

The week-long Dictionary Unit is summarized in this table (pdf).

Poster

The Dictionary Strategy is presented on this poster.

Sample Lesson

Students are introduced to the Dictionary Strategy in this lesson (pdf).

Sample Activity

In this activity (pdf), students read about the Smithsonian Institution and decide which definition best fits the context of the passage.

The Combined Strategy Unit is the culmination of the Word Learning Strategies program. During the unit, students look back over their work with the other three strategies and see how they are combined into one "super strategy".

Unit Overview

The final unit is two weeks long and contains six lessons, which are summarized in this table (pdf).

Poster

This poster provides a reminder to students about the Combined Strategy steps.

Sample Activity

In this activity (pdf), students use the Combined Strategy to determine the meanings of unknown words in a story about the WLS superheroes.

Sample Lesson

During this lesson (pdf), students play WLS Bingo to review the strategies, terms, prefixes, and suffixes learned during the previous 14 weeks.

Sample Test

The curriculum concludes with a test that includes both knowledge (pdf) and application (pdf) questions.