A teacher sent me this worksheet which is supposed to be practicing context clues
Patsy had accumulated so many pairs of shoes that she couldn’t fit the collection into her closet.
What does accumulated mean?
This question screams “low expectations!!”
It assumes that no student knows what “accumulated” means. Because, if you know what the word means, there’s no reason to use context clues.
The worksheet is full of these:
After falling off the swing, Max was in such anguish that he couldn’t even speak to the nurse about his extreme pain. What does anguish mean?
Certainly at least one student in the class already knows what “anguish” means, right?
If you want to practice using context, you cannot put a real word in there. You have to assume some students will already know any word you use.
The only answer here is to put a nonsense word in.
- Patsy had framsacked so many pairs of shoes that she couldn’t fit the collection into her closet.
- After falling off the swing, Max was in such munkle that he couldn’t even speak to the nurse about how much it hurt.
Now kids can actually use the sentence to get a rough understanding of the word’s meaning. I would also want to note what part of speech each word is. Framsacked looks like a verb, since Patsy is doing it. And munkle must be a noun since it’s a state that Max was in.
But why use these contrived examples when we could bring in a classic! Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky was MADE for this.
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