Teaching Strategies

Teaching Strategy: Making Inferences

One valuable, higher-level reading comprehension skill is the ability to make inferences. While this is a common occurrence for children in their everyday lives, it is often challenging to scaffold them in learning to draw inferences as they read. In her text, Reading Strategies That Work, Laura Robb (1996) examines the possibilities for using children's everyday experiences to teach them to make inferences as they read.

Think about the situations in which we make assumptions about people based upon their actions. Robb uses the examples of students falling asleep in class, leaving the room without permission, or copying one another's homework. Give these examples to your students, and then work with students to generate a list of other typical classroom occurrences. After coming up with some scenarios with your students, instruct students to work in small groups to act out the scenarios. As each scenario is enacted, instruct the rest of the class to jot down notes or discuss the possible reasons that each event has occurred.

After all students have been able to both act out and analyze scenarios, next point out to students that what they have just done is very similar to what good readers do when they make inferences. Your next step will be to apply the skill to an authentic work of children's literature.

In Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst, poor Alexander narrates his miserable life for us in great detail. Read this classic children's book to your students, and as each mishap befalls Alexander, instruct students to write down what they think Alexander is not saying--what caused each problem? Who was responsible? How did Alexander respond?

Conclude the lesson by suggesting to students that they use their writing workshop time to write stories that leave clues from which readers may make inferences.