Locate stories featuring vocabulary words that will challenge third-grade students. Use these stories and the words within them to teach the students how to decode context clues.
Define the term "context clues" for your students. If they know exactly what skill you are teaching them, they will be more likely to be able to use it. You may find it helpful to describe it as a game or a mystery to capture your students' imaginations and interest.
Provide the students with fill-in-the-blank sentences, such as "Jane put on her __________ and socks." Encourage the students to come up with words that fit in the blanks, such as "shoes" or "gloves." Tell the students that with context clues, they will do exactly the same thing, but instead of blanks, they will encounter challenging vocabulary words. Give the students a sentence such as, "Jane put on her galoshes and socks," and ask them what "galoshes" might mean based on the activity you completed previously.
Explain to your students that they have multiple strategies for determining context clues, such as looking at pictures, searching the sentence for synonyms and antonyms or using familiar words or ideas in the sentence that describe the new word. Write these strategies on the board so the students can refer back to them.
Distribute the story you chose for the students. Read it aloud. When you reach the first challenging vocabulary word, stop and model a "think-aloud" for the students, which entails voicing every part of the thought process of determining a word's definition. Following your lead, your students will know what their own thought processes should be. For instance, you might say, "Hmmm, I don't know what 'ravenous' means. What's the first thing I should do? Right, look at a picture. OK, tell me about the bear in the picture so I can guess what it means that the bear is 'ravenous.'"
Read through the story with your students using context clues to decode each vocabulary word, gradually decreasing the amount of prompting you give them as they become more able to use the strategies on their own.