Before reading ~

• Motivate students by involving them in an engaging learning activity connected to the strategy being taught. A possible example to introduce making inferences follows.
  • Bring in a bag of "stuff" supposedly the results of a locker clean-out.
  • Tell students to look at the "clues" and make an "educated guess" about the owner of the artifacts.
  • After students share their responses, inform them that they are making inferences, a strategy that carries over to reading.
• Explicitly describe the strategy, including when and how it is used. The process may proceed like this:
  • "An inference is often defined as 'an educated guess.'
  • Readers make inferences when they combine their background knowledge with information found in the text."
• Model making inferences by thinking aloud while reading a short excerpt from a piece of text. The "think-aloud" may go like this:
  • Read the first paragraph of "Captive," an essay by RB Salisbury, while stopping intermittently to make an inference.
    • "Bound in a blue plastic cape, the young captive blinked back tears as she sat motionless..." I can infer that the captive is NOT an adult and the captors have wrapped her up in some sort of plastic cape; perhaps because that's the only thing they could find. Because she is crying and doesn't struggle, I think she's scared.
    • "... she sat motionless on the yellow, backless stool in the middle of the kitchen."If she's in the kitchen, she may have been discovered by intruders involved in a home invasion. I am making these inferences because the author uses words like bound and captive are clues of some sort of abuse, but the stool in the kitchen hint that this is taking place in a home.

During reading ~

• After modeling several such inferences, ask students to "think aloud" as they make some inferences from "Captive."
• Over the next few days, teacher and students continue reading various texts aloud, making inferences as they do so.
• Gradually, fade from the picture and prompt students to make inferences on their own.
  • Encourage students to make inferences in other classes and outside of class as well.
  • Instructional tools can be used to practice or assess whether or not students are making relevant inferences.
    • Reading journal prompts that require students to write out their "think-aloud" process of making inferences related to a particular text
    • "It Says - I Say" activity to record author's clues and the reader's inferences drawn from those clues
    • Cartoon or bumper sticker learning activity also demonstrates how important it is to have sufficient background knowledge to make a correct inference. What background knowledge is needed to make accurate inferences in the following 2 examples?
      • Political cartoon shows Hillary Clinton, dressed in a yellow pant suit, helping soldiers raise the American flag on Iwo Jima. Words in callout bubble read, "There we were taking sniper fire.."
      • Sign in cafeteria reads: "Your mother doesn't work here."

After comprehension lesson ~
To reinforce reading comprehension strategies, it is natural and important to re-introduce them as part of ongoing reading activities in the classroom as the need arises.