Recycled Guest Posts: Inferencing

I’m recycling some guest posts I did over the last year while I am on vacation.  I hope you are having a great week!
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One of my favorite skills to work with older children is inferencing.   So I’m really excited (and a little nervous) about my first guest post for Carrie’s first year blog-a-versary.  Today, I’d like to share how I teach inferencing and some of my favorite inferencing resources.

I start by telling my clients that we are going to be working on inferencing.  We define inferencing as the ability to look at the information provided and then make a guess about what we think is going to happen.

Inferencing:

• improves social skills
• improves reading skills
• improves language skills 

We talk about HOW LONG a book would be if the author had to write every little thing down.   Usually, we decide we don’t want to read a book that is THAT long.

When teaching inferences, I’m less concerned about the correct answer and more interested in the PROCESS that the child used to make the inference.  So usually I will have them guess the inference and then circle or TELL me the clues they used to figure out the inference.

Then I have them explain why it couldn’t have been a different choice.  In the above example, it couldn’t have been a restaurant because the boy went up to the COUNTER to order.  It couldn’t have been a Mexican restaurant because he ordered a HAMBURGER.  

I’m always looking for new ways to teach inferences.   Here are some of my Favorite resources or products:  

1.  Super Duper Cards:  Super Duper has sets of actual inferencing cards which are pretty basic.  They also have some of the available as an App.  

2.  No Glamour Inferences by Linguisystems.  I send these worksheets home for home programming.  My favorite section is the section on Object Inferences.  This book also works on Social inferencing which is helpful for many of my clients.  

3.  David Newmonic Inferencing book.   This is my go to resource for Middle school students.  This ebook does a great job of breaking down inferences into pictures, sentences, paragraph level material and then a full text.  The material is more appropriate to older clients.  

4.  Phil Tulga-Inference Riddles online.  This game is played online.  The clues are given one at a time.  You get 10 chances to guess the term.  These are more abstract concepts such as “day.”  You can also buy an expanded version of this for 4.95 on his site.

5.  What’s in the Bag game on ReadWriteThink.org: I like using this online game with younger clients.  Three words are presented and the student needs to guess what’s in the bag.  You can present it with just the clues or click continue to get three color choices.  If you haven’t been on Readwritethink.org’s website you are missing out. 

Do you guys work on inferencing?  If so I’d love to hear your favorite materials or resources.  

Thanks again Carrie for letting me come over and celebrate!