Making Inferences

On Friday we introduced our next thinking strategy...inferring. We started with one of my favorite activities. To start the lesson Ms. Cavallaro and I each showed the class a pair of shoes that we told the class that we had picked up at a garage sale. We asked the class to make inferences about the person who wore the shoes. The class quickly started sharing their inferences. They inferred that my pair was a man's shoe that was well worn. The also inferred that the mystery man played sports in the shoes and he mowed the grass wearing the shoes. For Ms. Cavallaro's boots they inferred that the girl who had worn them wore them a lot. They inferred that the boots might have been worn to ride horses or to go dancing. They also inferred that these boots were a favorite pair.

We kept track of all these inferences on the left side of a T-chart at the front of the room. When we had collected all the inferences, we made the class explain the evidence that they had used to make these inferences. The students used lots of different pieces of evidence like the green stains on my shoes or the worn toe and heel on the boots or just the style of the shoe to explain their inferences.

Today we did another lesson to get students to understand that to make an inference they have to use evidence. We told the class that Ms. Cavallaro had a new neighbor that was quite interesting. They never came out of their house and things just did not seem right. We continued the story by letting the class know that Ms. Cavallaro had become so interested that this morning she took a bag of their trash. We opened up the bag of trash and started to look through all of the evidence. Again we made a T-chart to list all of this evidence. Tables quickly started to turn this evidence into schema.

Inferring is such an important part of reading. We will continue this week to talk about inferring. Just as with all of our other thinking strategies we have thinking stems that the students are prompted to use when sharing their thinking. Here are the thinking stems for inferring:

• My guess is...
• Perhaps...
• Maybe...
• It could be that...
• This could mean...
• I infer...

You could try and prompt our students to use these thinking stems at home when they are sharing their thinking about their at home reading.

I hope you all had a great start to your week.