I remember having a 1960s reading textbook around the house when I was growing up (I think it was a teacher's version that my mother had bought secondhand) that had little stories about kids reading for context clues - someone figuring out what "aileron" meant was one, and there was another about figuring out what it meant that a girl put on "her mother's old mules" to run outside, or something like that. (Apparently it was called Reading for Meaning: High Roads.)