Context Clues: Advice from Educator and Founder of Fostering Student Growth

When determining the meaning of an unknown word, you do not want your child making a random guess regarding the word's meaning. However, you do want your child to apply clues that help them find the meaning. This is more of a structured "guess" that your child is making rather than just picking a meaning based on nothing. 

To help your child figure out the word's meaning, help them learn how to apply context Clues. Applying context clues could look like this: You're sitting with your child reading a book and come across the word, "scampered" and your child asks what that means. Rather than tell your child what scampered means, you apply context clues by saying, "Let's look at the sentence." "The squirrel scampered up the tree when it saw the cat". Now you might say to your child, "What do squirrels do when they see you? They run right? So, could scamper mean run?" 

By asking your child to use their prior knowledge of what they know about squirrel encounters, you have given them a context clues tool that they can apply to understand unfamiliar words in text.

Context clues could also look like this: Your child is completing Social Studies homework and asks, what does "vastness" mean? Rather than letting them, "search it up", read the sentences together and see if there are any context clues that can be applied. "The vastness of the plains made the settlers nervous. They were scared by the hugeness of the area." Now your child and you can have a conversation about how vastness and hugeness mean the same thing.

By showing your child how to apply context clues, you are helping them build reading independence.  When your child comes across a word they may not know, they will have a tool to help them figure out that word's meaning, rather than asking you to define each word.