Cloze Activities for Fifth Grade

You can provide students with class notes, minus important words; students then fill in the blanks during your lecture. This technique encourages your class to pay attention and engage during a lecture. It lets students glimpse where you are going next, which helps them understand the big picture of a lecture. In addition, the missing words can help students gauge what you consider to be important -- and what they may see later on a test.

Cloze activities can help students learn important content vocabulary. This technique is especially effective when mastering difficult words in science and facts that are easily mixed up in social studies, such as important people, locations, and historical battles. Cloze activities also help many students quickly learn math vocabulary, theories and cue words from word problems that show what operation to use.

Completing a passage from a text with a word omitted every seven to 10 words helps build reading fluency. Students must determine what words make sense and flow well with the passage. This strategy can be used with fiction or nonfiction; it's most effective with text that students have not read before. You can include a few bonus blanks, where the students make up words that would fit well in a sentence. Fifth graders enjoy comparing their bonus blank responses as a class.

Cloze activities can be an effective preparation for standardized tests. When reviewing material covered earlier in the year, the cloze word banks can help students recall what they previously learned. This can save a lot of instructional review time by helping you target areas that students may have struggled with or missed before. .