A Northern Light
Context Clues for chapters 1-5 (pages 1-57)
Name: ______Total: _____ / 12
Target Goal: I can define words using context clues.
Directions: Write what you think the bold/underlined word means due to the context in the passage. Circle or underline the context that assisted you in defining the word.
- “He’d take his clothes off in back of the house, douse them with kerosene, and burn them. He’d douse his head, too, and Lawton would comb the dead lice from his hair” (19).
- “He sat down, looking thunderous, no doubt toting up the money he’d lost on the dead piglets” (21).
- “I stared at my hands—red, cracked, old woman’s hands—and saw what was in store for me: a whole summer of drudgery and no money for it. Cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing, feeding chickens, slopping pigs, milking cows, churning cream, salting butter, making soap, plowing, planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, haying, threshing, canning—doing everything that fell on the eldest in a family of four girls, a dead mother, and a pissant brother who took off to drive boats on the Erie Canal and refused to come back and work the farm like he ought to” (23).
- “’Give me a bucket, then. I’m starving.’
‘No. You’re eating everything we pick,’ Weaver said.
She turned her hangdog eyes on me. ‘Please, Mattie?’ she wheedled. I shook my head. ‘Dr. Wallace said you were to take exercise, Min. He said it would do you good. Get down and pick your own fiddleheads’” (27).
- “I was scared for Weaver sometimes. We had hillbillies in the North Woods, same as they had in Mississippi—ignorant folk just itching to blame their no-account lives on someone else—and Weaver never stepped off the sidewalk or doffed his hat. He’d scrap with anyone who called him
n-----, and was never scared for himself” (33).
- “But I’d also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest of days” (37).
- “I go back to cranking the ice cream and embellishing my romantic and tragic story, writing it all out in my mind. Carl Grahm and Grace Brown were in love. That’s why they were here. They were eloping, not sneaking, no matter what Cook says” (47).
- “It’s a new kind of story for me—the kind that stitches things up nicely and leaves no ends dangling and makes me feel placid instead of all stirred up. The kind that has a happy ending—or at least as happy an ending as is possible with the heroine dead and the hero presumed so” (47).
- “Nothing on our entire farm—not the balky hay wagon, not the stumps in the north field, not even the rocks in the lower meadow—was as unyielding, as immovable, as adamant and uncompromising as Pleasant the mule” (48).
- “I didn’t see what that had to do with engagements, but if anyone would know, it was my aunt. She is an invalid and has nothing to entertain herself with other than gossip. She is on every scrap of hearsay like a bear on a brook trout” (51).