Our elementary students are becoming detectives as they read text. We are learning that good readers use their schema (background knowledge or everything in your head) and evidence or clues to make predictions, determine word meaning, discover character traits and determine author's purpose or meaning as they read books. Children enjoy being detectives and figuring out problems and solutions.
Teachers explicitly model how to infer through a variety of activities. We began our unit by looking at household items.... what is this object, have you seen someone use it, does it remind you of another tool? a garlic press, a hand potato masher, an egg separator. The students love figuring it out.
Teachers then shared famous paintings.....what is the artist trying to show us, what might be happening, what might the title be? I used a Grant Wood painting of a one-room school house in Iowa. It was a fun way to make inferences about an artist from Iowa. We discovered we do have a lot of schema for Iowa!
Next came wordless books, simple text and then books with new, "juicy" vocabulary. The students watch how to infer, then infer with support from the teacher, practice but with guidance and eventually infer independently without teacher help. (The Gradual Release Model) A student needs to see this every year as they learn to read and as they read at more difficult reading levels.
Good readers make good inferences!
Happy Reading-Mrs. Speake
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