In my previous blog post, I explained my process for helping students answer questions #3 and #6, the vocabulary questions, correctly in Read Live. Part of my process involved motivating the students to do their best work, which I explained in detail in my previous post. In this post, I’ll delve into the details of how I set up and presented the lesson demonstrating how to answer questions #3 and #6 successfully.

Before presenting the demonstration lesson to the students, I enrolled and licensed a demonstration student using one of my extra Read Live licenses. I wanted to spend the majority of the lesson time working with students on answering the vocabulary questions, so I set up the demonstration student’s story options as follows:

  • I selected level 3.5, so the story would be fairly short and still include question #6.
  • I set a relatively low goal, so meeting the goal would not be an issue.
  • I went into Story Options and turned off the Cold Timing step. I also set the number of read alongs to 0 and the number of practices to 1.

On the day of the lesson, I projected the Read Live webpage on the whiteboard and logged in as the demonstration student. I selected a story and completed the Key Words and Prediction steps. While doing these steps, I explained to the students how the Key Words and Prediction steps begin the process of learning the vocabulary words in the story. 

Since the Cold Timing step was turned off, the Read Along step came up next. I pointed out that the blue words in the story are important vocabulary words and will be tested during the Quiz step. I clicked on one blue word to demonstrate how easy it is to learn the words. Then, I reminded the students that they should click on every blue word on each page of the story and listen or read along before completing the Read Along step.

Next, the students and I did the practice step together, making sure to read well enough to meet the goal the first time. When I clicked Next, the quiz began. We worked through questions #1 and #2 quickly, so we could focus on question #3 (the word-in-context question). 

I reminded the students that words can have several meanings, and that our task on question #3 was to determine which meaning the word had in this story. Then I explained that we needed to find the word in the story—which is easy to do, because it’s blue. Once we found the word, we needed to read three sentences to help us figure out the meaning of the word in this story. We needed to read the sentence the word was in, as well as the sentences on either side of the sentence containing the word. After reading these three sentences, the students and I went back to the word and figured out what it meant. We clicked on the word to check our thinking. Now, I explained, we were ready to answer the question. I modeled rereading the question and checking the answer before clicking next.

Next, the students and I quickly answered questions #4 and #5 so we could tackle question #6 (the multi-part vocabulary definition question). I reminded the students to always read question #6 carefully, because sometimes it asks for the antonym, not the synonym. After we read the question, I clicked on the dropdown box to see our answer choices. I told the students that the choices were the same for all the items in the question, so they should read all the choices the first time they click on the dropdown box. After we read the answer choices together, I reminded the students that we could go back into the story and click on any word we were unsure of to review its meaning. We then worked through the items together, clicking on a couple of the blue words to review their meanings.

We did not go on to question #7 or complete the rest of the story for this lesson, because we were focusing on the vocabulary questions.

After completing the lesson, the students seemed more confident in their ability to answer the vocabulary questions correctly. After all, I explained that the answer is just a click away—it’s always right there in the story if they know where to look for it. The immediate improvement in their vocabulary question scores after this lesson was proof that they now had the tools they needed to succeed.