An impoverished vocabulary is a major problem for many middle school students. Sometimes, even a dictionary offers little help; these students often don't understand the dictionary definition.

Figuring out meaning from context clues may be the best skill and strategy possible for these students.

However, practices and worksheets can also be frustrating for the teacher because you don't know which students already know the vocabulary words. Did your student get the answer right because he figured out the word from context -- or because he already knew it?

This lesson is practically guaranteed to avoid that problem. It uses words that sound like nonsense words but are actually real words. Very few of your students will know these words ahead of time (they include bamboozle, kerfluffle, googolplex, troglodyte, bumfuzzle, macaronic, biblioklept, and more!) However, the sentences surrounding the words have lots of context clues, so you and your students can truly have a "pure" experience of figuring out the meaning of an unknown word from context.

Students can have a laugh at these goofy-sounding words as they do this lesson.

Lessons Included:

• Context Clues in Vocabulary - Silly Words! Digital and Print

• Context Clues in Vocabulary Two - Figure out the meaning of these silly words

• Context Clues in Vocabulary - Silly Words Three

• Context Clues in Vocabulary - Silly Words four

Answer keys are all included.