Making Inferences

I'm going to do a quick flash back to about two weeks ago to share what we did in our class as we learned that great readers infer as they read.

Definitely nothing cute this year, but it worked! 

I started the week with a great lesson from Comprehension Connections. We safety-pinned emotion cards to the back of a child's shirt and then we shared clues about times that we felt that way.  The child had to guess which emotion was pinned to their back. This lesson was a BIG hit and it was also great for introducing inferring. We never told the child if they were correct or not because we wanted them to infer, not predict. We made sure not to confirm the child's inference about the emotion card.  It also was great because sometimes people feel differently about things.  This helped prove that sometimes what we infer is right and sometimes wrong, but we will never know be CERTAIN!

Grab the emotion cards here for FREE!

Something interesting I learned while looking for great lesson for my kinder friends is that the difference between a prediction and inference is that predictions are confirmed, inferences are never confirmed.  

We continued the fun with some great videos on YouTube.  They were wordless, which was great because it pushed my students to really look at what was going on.  Our only "text evidence" was from what we saw.  We inferred how the pigeon felt and how the man felt throughout the video.

We then did the well-known "Neighbor's Trash" lesson from the wonderful author of Comprehension Connections. Since I forgot to gather trash from home, I just grabbed the trash that I could find in my purse and around my classroom. HA! I love this lesson because just think I'm CRAZY for "digging in my neighbor's trash"! 

We then ended our week by transferring our knowledge to texts as we read some books that were wordless. It really flowed well, especially since we had the practice earlier in the week with the video.   We really enjoyed these selections!

What do you do to teach this comprehension skill? I think it's a tough one! We will definitely revisit it later in the year!