Teaching Students to Make an Inference

Teaching Students To Make an Inference

Inferring is a strategy I’ve always thought was tricky for my students to understand.  The funny thing is, our students infer things all the time. The most important thing to do is to give students a concrete definition of inference.  Lots of students mix inferring up with just stating the obvious.  But inferring is much more than that. When you infer, one uses facts, observations, and logic or reasoning to come up with an assumption or conclusion.  A child friendly definition is:

“Combining your schema or background knowledge, with clues from the text, to form a new idea.”

Because students inference all the time, the next thing to do when teaching inference is to tell them that they are already experts at this strategy.  One way you can do this is with a few hands on games:

 “Who’s Bag Is This?”

A teacher friend of mine would always teacher inferring by bring a few old bags from home and filling them with miscellaneous things.  You may have your students guess where this mystery person is about to go, or maybe even guess what they owner of the bags profession is.  Not only will they have to make the right assumption, but students need to also be able to tell why they inferred the way they did.

“Me” Bags

The teachers can model a “me bag” for her students.  I filled my bag up with items such as running shoes, a metal, a marathon sticker, and a bottle of Gatorade.  Then, I had students infer something about me.  You can do this as an activity and follow it up by having all students bring a “me bag” to share with the class.

Jigsaw An Inference

This something even lower grade students can do. …

Find a few pictures of animals or objects, and cut them up into a handful of pieces.  Students can take turns revealing one piece of the picture until they are able to conclude what the picture is.  Students can play against each other and whoever guesses their picture in the least amount of pieces is the winner.  You can even cut the picture into even smaller pieces and have students roll a die to tell them how many small pieces to get for each turn.

Context Clues and Inferring

After being so hands on with inferring your students will have a firm understanding of what it is.  At this point, it is important to show them how to infer meanings of words within a text.  Therefore, students must use context clues.  The main thing for students to be successful in this area is to give them “word Power”.  I define word power as using words or parts of words you know, to help you figure out tricky words you may be unsure of.  This means, students need to have a firm knowledge of prefix and suffixes, they should be exposed to lots of base words.   For example Beautiful is easy to understand if you know the word beauty and the definition of the suffix –ful. 

This is by far the hardest part of inferring for students to do.  There are many resources on the web that have printable context clue cards to practice this skill.  One example can be found HERE.

Making Inferences in Writing

Learning about inference is a great time to teach “show not tell” for writing.  A teacher can create a inference challenge.  She can give each table a different emotion and have the students write about the things the a character might be doing to portray that emotion without using the actual word. This would mean they would have to use their background knowledge or schema of the emotion they were given, and provide clues for their reader to make the appropriate assumptions.

Challenge your students to uses this same concept in their writing.  Maybe a student would like to show in their story that they are scared.  Students will need to give their readers enough clues about being scared, without using the actual word scared, in order get their point across.  Look for examples of this in books with pictures, and without.