During a
reading activity, I discovered something about my 4th graders. Most of them had no idea what to do when they
came to words that they didn’t understand.
This, to me, was very surprising.
Surprising, because I know that they did receive instruction, but
because it doesn’t stick. That’s what’s
been bugging me so much about returning to the upper grades after a number of
years away-why isn’t instruction sticking the way it used to! How come kids are not independent on
strategies when they enter the next grade?
I have a number of ideas as to what it is, but that’s not for now. Right
now we are talking context clues-so back to the topic!
While we
were investigating how text features work through our science focus of the
nature of science, I introduced key words.
Key words are usually bold face, italicized, and/or colored. In this particular text, they were colored. We recorded our text feature in our reading
journal, talked about what to look for, focused on the fact that these words
WILL show up on tests, and talked about how, in the content area they must
retain them because they will be expected to know them forever without
review. Then I got back to focusing on what
to do with them. I informed them that I
was going to read the information after the key word and they were to let me
know what the definition of the word was.
I read, I stopped, and I heard crickets when I asked what the definition
was. Crickets, nothing but
crickets. Most were looking at me like I
had asked the hardest question in the world!
INTERVENTION TIME! So, I asked,
“What context clue do you see here?”
Crickets, again! MORE
INTERVENTION TIME! Being the wise owl
that I am, I jumped into my large, and I mean large, supply closet (Oh, trust me, you’d be VERY jealous. I’m very tempted to write a post on it, but I
think I’d get hate mail!) and pulled out my context clue signs.
I’ve had these for years, and they are showing it. We turned our page in our reading journals
and began to record the information.
The
kids obediently did so. We returned to
the book, repeated the same, and….crickets. Yes, at this point, I couldn’t
figure out what to do, and then it hit me.
There are two types of context clues-whispers and shouts.
Kids need
novelty. Brain research says that it helps them to remember and learn. For some reason, I realized that these
obvious, right-there context clues shout at us.
So, I began to explain that there was a word from our list on the page,
and it was shouting to us. I would shout
when I got to the word, and that would signal the definition. Every time I said shout, I shouted! In fact, since then, I shout when I’m talking
about shouting context clues. It’s
driving them nuts-but it’s working. It’s
really working. It’s helping them pay
attention when we are reading materials that have key words in them. This is what I mean by how context clues
shout-they are right there, on the page, giving the definition.
Next we
moved onto the whispers of context clues.
When Scholastic had their awesome $1 sale, I thought it was worth the
risk of buying a set of books on direct reading topics. I picked up this one:
What I did was I ran copies of the teaching page for my kids
at 86% reduction, making it small enough to fit their reading journal.
On the teaching page are the whisper clues
for words they don’t know. That’s what I
called these, the whisper clues. And I
whispered. The novelty is there,
again. Whisper when you teach them;
shout when you teach the others. So,
whispering, we moved on to learn about how to handle these. This starts with identifying a word you don’t
know. You see, I know up until now, most
kids have been just skipping over the words they don’t know. They are almost doing context clues in
reverse. They skip the word they don't
know, and use the context to build understanding. But that won’t continue to work on the harder
texts that they are reading. They need
to begin to pay attention to words and what’s around them-and to use the clues
to figure out the word. Once we learned
the whisper clues, we started to practice.
This book comes with 18 opportunities to practice the skill. We have been practicing! What’s great about this, is it will help kids
to move to questions like this:
- Read
the sentence below from pg. 25:
“That man’s dotty!” muttered Grandma
Josephine.
In this sentence, what does dotty mean?
This question is styled like the FCAT 2.0 questions are
written and, more than likely, how most of the Common Core assessments will be
written as well. This is a little sample
of questions I’m working on for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is how the kids need to be able to handle
context clues. And, if you notice, the
book also includes figurative language, and, yes, they are found on FCAT 2.0
and within the Common Core standards. Is
this worth the investment of time and effort to really teach and make the kids
independent with-yes, it is! Not just
for FCAT 2.0 or other assessments, but because it’s a life skill for any
reader! Isn’t that what we are really
striving for. We might practice the
style of question we need them to learn, but these skills are for life. I want my students to walk away understanding
that words matter, and to take the time to begin to understand them. They need the shouts and whispers of context
clues to do that!
How do you
teach context clues? I’d really like to
have some additional ideas and resources that you use. I know I will have kids I need to remediate
this area in and would love some additional ideas. Please leave me a comment about how you do
context clues!
