Teaching specific words a teacher plans to have his third-grade class read the novel Stone Fox, by John Reynolds Gardiner. In this novel, a young boy enters a dogsled race in hopes of winning prize money to pay the taxes on his grandfather’s farm. The teacher knows that understanding the concept of taxes is important to understanding the novel’s plot. Therefore, before his students begin reading the novel, the teacher may do several things to make sure that they understand what the concept means and why it is important to the story. For example, the teacher may: • engage students in a discussion of the concept of taxes; and/or • read a sentence from the book that contains the word taxes and ask students to use context and their prior knowledge to try to figure out what it means. To solidify their understanding of the word, the teacher might ask students to use taxes in their own sentences. (p. 31).