Inference Ideas from Colleagues

Many of my colleagues have come up with wonderful ideas to engage students in the act of inferencing in the classroom. Here are just a few of them:

• After studying inferences (or other grammar or reading strategies), students could write and record song lyrics to explain or use the strategy. Thank you, Jen, for this example of lyric-writing in our content area.

• Movie trailers. Thank you, Lindsey:

"A good introductory activity could be showing students movie trailers and having them describe what they think the movie will be about. By using a visual representation it is much less intimidating than a text but it still gets the point across. The teacher can first model what they want the students to do by showing a trailer and then scripting her thoughts, her inferences, about the movie. Then they can try it on their own. Students will infer who will be the main characters, the setting, the plot, etc. All of these things can be derived from a novel or portion of text as well."

• Drawing pictures of books or articles and having students infer the time, place, and characters. Thank you, Lindsay.

• Tweets. Thank you, Denise, for your ideas:

"So, how do we as teachers help students understand what an inference is and how important this strategy is for them? We tell them that they are already masters at it! Kids infer everyday while reading texts and tweets.

For example take this tweet Lil’ Wayne sent out to his followers the other day:

So amped about my new klothing line “TRUKFIT”!!!!! Kant wait to get to Denver and shred ice maaaannnnn!!! I am a very happy kamper.thkGOD

Turning a blind eye to the really bad spelling errors, I would show this to students and ask them what this tweet means. Most likely they will say, “shred ice means snowboarding!” and I would say, “Ahhh, you're making an inference!” Kids infer meanings every single day through their texts and tweets, so making inferences when reading should come natural to them. We infer that Lil’ Wayne is excited about his clothing line, he is going snowboarding in Denver, he is a very happy person and he believes in God."