Reading Strategy: Monitor Your Reading

As you read, you may see words that you don’t know. Sometimes you can skip a word, keep reading, and still understand the text. Other times, you need to figure out the word in order to understand what you are reading.

Reading Strategy: Monitor Your Reading
    How to Clarify Vocabulary

  • 1. When you come to a word or phrase you don’t know, reread the words and sentences nearby.

  • 2. Look for context clues. Think about how the word is used and what the paragraph is about. Use the clues to figure out what the word means.

  • 3. Replace the word you don’t know with the meaning you figured out. Does that meaning make sense in the sentence?

Strategy in Action

Here’s how one student clarified vocabulary.

Look Into the Text: All the World’s Water

What does incredible amount mean here? When I reread the sentence, I still don’t understand.

Billions of liters is a lot! Maybe incredible amount means “a lot.” “A lot of water” makes sense.

An incredible amount of water covers Earth. Look at a globe. The blue area represents the water. There are about 200 billion liters (53 billion gallons) of water for each person on Earth!

There is not always enough water to drink, however.

Most of Earth’s water is salty ocean water. Salt water is fine for sea creatures. But it is not fine for humans and most other animals.

Practice Together

Follow the steps in the How-To box to clarify the meaning of the word fine in the passage above. Discuss how you used the strategy.