Making inferences is all about teaching your students that sometimes what the author leaves out is just as important as what they say. We want our students to connect to the authors and be able to identify the author’s purpose and gain a deeper understanding of the text they read. Making Inferences is a foundation skill that your students need to learn to be successful.
Why is Making Inferences Important?
Characters rarely act the way we expect them to in a story. When the author makes choices in their writing, it’s usually intentional! It’s essential that your students can follow a character’s progress and understand the author’s choices. They must ask why the author made that choice and how this impacts the character.
Making Inferences and using a variety of formats to do this can help your students draw conclusions and promote reading comprehension and critical thinking in the classroom. They need to understand that it’s sometimes what the author leaves out that can be just as important to the story. This seemingly simple concept sounds easy to us, but for some students, this can be a struggle.
Why do Many Students Struggle with Drawing Conclusions?
Many students struggle by connecting the author’s understanding and bringing the author’s stories to life. There are many reasons why students may be struggling with this concept.
A few of these include:
- Lack of background knowledge
- Lack of experiences
- Lack of precursor reading strategy skills such as automaticity
- Lack of ability to pick out details in a text
- Lack of vocabulary
However, there are a few ways that teachers (and parents) can help students draw conclusions using Inferences.
Here are some ideas:
- Picture walks prior to reading
- Use wordless picture books
- Play 20 Questions
- Create visual scenarios
- Use riddles frequently
- Implement writing (especially short responses and note-taking)
- Teach vocabulary
- Know there can be more than one correct answer.
- Use magazine photos or stock photos
- Use comic strip
- Make Question and Inferences anchor charts
- Think-aloud and modeling
How I Use Making Inferences to Draw Conclusions in the Classroom!
After being in the classroom with elementary-age students for years, one thing I can tell you is that by using a variety of multimedia and text can benefit students.
The reason why is simple. There isn’t one type of learner in your classroom. As teachers, we have to find a way to help visual, auditory, sensory, and all types of learners in your classroom. Teaching in one way or one format isn’t going to reach most of your students!
When I teach Making Inferences, I use text, comics, and photographs whenever possible to teach this concept. Giving my students’ sentence frames or short questions are also a helpful tool to help generate thoughts and writing.
You can also use Question Stems to help your students draw conclusions! Check out this post for more about Question Stems.
No matter what types of learners you have in your classroom, I hope that this resource has given you a new idea for how to encourage your students to draw conclusions.
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