Mentor Texts: Make Inferences

Making inferences is a skill that comes naturally to most students and they don’t even realize how or why it helps them. Kids can look at someone crying with a dropped ice cream cone on the ground next to them and know they are sad because their ice cream cone fell. Kids are naturally great inferencers, it is our job to make them intentional inferencers!

When taught, inferencing can be a rather abstract concept for students. My favorite way to start teaching this skill is through wordless picture books. There is something so magical about interpreting a story just through the beautiful pictures. Empowering a student to do this is even more magical.

Check out some of these wordless picture books on Amazon:

• Be A Friend
• Chalk
• Spring Hare
• Where’s Walrus
• Pancakes For Breakfast
• Blackout
• Flotsam
• Good Dog Carl or any in the series!
• Journey

Check out more about these books on Amazon:

• Voices In The Park
• Enemy Pie
• Sylvester and The Magic Pebble
• The Gardener
• The Invisible Boy
• My Lucky Day
• The Koala Who Could
• Elmer
• The Bear Ate Your Sandwich

I have found that teacher modeling of making inferences is the best way for students to understand and start to inference themselves. The mentor texts mentioned above provide amble opportunities for teacher think alouds of making inferences. Read more below about the specific instructional strategy I use to model and teach inferences.

All kids love the challenge of solving mysteries and looking for clues. If you ask a child to make an inference, they will do it BUT it doesn’t activate the excited part of their brain that will make for an engaging meaningful experience! Isn’t making an inference like solving a mystery? Looking for hidden clues, reading between the lines, thinking about what isn’t said to form an understanding… seems like a work of a detective to me!

Engage Your Students In A Concrete Understanding of Inferences with Izzy The Inferencer

Izzy The Inferencer is a detective who is an expert at teaching kids to infer. He is part of my Comprehension Crew instructional strategy. The Comprehension Crew is a group of characters each representing an essential reading skill. Each character has a profession, song, gesture, and prop that provide a concrete representation of the reading skill. These characters are used to model and reinforce the reading skill both in real life and in text. The character association helps students to understand, remember, and intentionally apply skills as they are reading. This teaching format helps you provide intentional, concrete, and meaningful experiences with making inferences for your students.

Izzy uses his magnifying glass to zoom in on text and picture details then connects them to his own experiences. He uses these clues to make inferences about the text such as:

• characters’ feelings, thoughts, ideas, intentions, actions
• unknown words or phrases
• settings    
• ETC!

Click on the picture below to see this resource pack. The product includes a model lesson to teach inferencing with any text and an abundance of inferencing activities! Izzy can start helping you teach inferences today!

(Affiliate links were used in this blog post.)