As mentioned in previous posts, Whole Class Guided Reading: Scratching the Surface and Making a Start and Teaching Essential Reading Skills Beyond the Words, teaching inference skills to children is very complex and takes a lot of patience and guidance. To “infer” information from a text requires an awful lot of higher-order thinking, to which a lot of children aren’t familiar with (yet). That is why guiding and supporting them in how to think in a higher-order, is essential for their understanding of a text on a deeper level.

Finding a deeper meaning and understanding in words can be very difficult for children, particularly if English is not their first language. We’re expecting them to extract information from words they’re maybe:

1. Unfamiliar with.

or

2. Struggling to understand the meaning on a basic level.

Inference skills still need to be taught to all children. They need this skill to access information across the entire curriculum and in general day-to-day life too. So if they’re struggling to “infer” information from words…take the words away.

This week in guided reading, we spent 10 minutes discussing this picture.

• What we could see.
• Where we thought it was.
• What the weather was like at that point.

Etc. You get the idea. I then asked children to look at the 4 questions displayed around the picture. In pairs, they discussed possible answers to these questions, using the sentence starters (in red) to structure their answers. By discussing these questions aloud, it encourages children to agree/disagree with each other, therefore increasing their ability to think critically about something. At this point, no matter what the reading level of the child, each individual could access the lesson. There was a buzz of chatter around the classroom, which pleased me, knowing that all of the children were engaged.

Following this intelligent discussion, children each stuck the same photo into their books and answered the questions displayed on the slide. Children were encouraged to use the red scaffolding to start their sentences, if they were struggling. Thus supporting each child to access the lesson’s content.

Plenary

To keep the pace and buzz about the lesson, I asked children to walk around the room and select the most interesting answer from a child in the class.

Rules:

• They don’t have to be your friend.
• You need to explain why you like/dislike their idea.

Children read other’s ideas with excitement and were eager to share their thoughts. They were then challenged to think about whether these answers made sense or were they explained fully? Children then gave their partner one piece of advice on their answers, whether it was to add more detail or to use full sentences (they love playing the teacher).

Having felt that children’s inference skills were progressing through this method, I went ahead and made slides for the remainder of the week. Find them here: Inference Skills

If you’ve tried anything similar that’s worked, I’d love to hear from you. Comment below and let us know!

Or to download some reading resources, click here.