Practical Approaches to Teaching the Reading Skill of Making Inferences

With Common Core, students will need to learn how to make inferences in reading informational texts.  This key academic skill is one that is a must in achieving academic success in school at all grade levels.  It is one of the most important reading skills that determines success or failure in the university, and institutions of higher learning expect that all students come prepared to use that skill (among others) to interact independently with informational text. 

Common Core Standards in all content areas lay the groundwork in transforming students into independent life long learners--learners who will have the skills to find resources and use them to solve real world problems.  To develop this major skill, students must learn how to pull meaning from text on their own.  This takes time and lots of practice.  Here the teacher is the guide who through modeling, using lots of meaningful checks for understanding, including multiple project based learning activities, etc. sets students up to carefully nurture and hone that skill up to that point where teacher guidance is needed less and less.

MAKING INFERENCES offers an insightful look at some approaches to aid students in reading between the lines.  With regular practice where the teacher gradually releases control to students to practice this skill with partners, small groups, and eventually on their own, students perfect the skill and therefore experience increased success in making sense of informational text material with less and less teacher support.  This sight offers a look at activities that demonstrate how to hone this skill.  Tie the skill to what they already know and do--make inferences all the time.  One example from the link is that if a student enters a class with a wet umbrella, other students can safely assume that it is raining outside.  Relate the new to the known.  With this background, proceed to applying this art to text material using the graphic organizer in the clip, one of your own, or ONE FROM FREEOLOGY.

If you have other approaches to teaching this skill, please share it with me and I will post it.  After all, teachers have a reputation for working together to support students:)

Denise

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Scaffold ELLs in Reading and Writing in All Content Areas and ALL Grade Levels With SENTENCE FRAMES

As an instructional coach for teachers of ELLs in mainstream classes, I am always trying to find effective and easy-to-implement strategies that will make the reading and writing processes a bit clearer for their ELLs.  Many of these students have been in school in the U.S. for only a few years.  Their speaking abilities are fine for everyday interactions with peers and teachers, but their skills here do not transfer over into academic reading and writing skills.  So what is a teacher to do with a class size of 32 and only 3 students are ELLs? 

One approach has its origins in elementary school---sentence frames.  Here is an example:  The dog ______ his meal quickly.  Students have just had a lesson on simple past verbs and are now being asked to select one of them to put in the sentence.  The ANSWER is ATE.  Though the entire class would be doing this activity, the teacher would provide the ELL with time to reread the sentence strips with a partner to practice reading and fluency skills.  Students could also write them in notebooks to practice grammar.  For the ELLs, they would now have correct samples of sentences to refer back to when required to write their own sentences for homework or other class activities. 

Sentence frames can be created by the teacher for any discipline or grade level.  Here is a video from a social studies lesson for ELLs using sentence strips USING SENTENCE FRAMES IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (VIDEO)  Notice how the students are using recently acquired academic language in the sentence frames.  This type of context embedded vocabulary practice makes the text more accessible which leads to improving reading skills.  Further, good reading skills lead to good writing skills.  Dr. Krashen, a leader in the field of instructional theory for ELLs, is a firm believer in the connection between the two. 

For the teachers I will be assisting,  I will be creating multiple strips using laminated sentence strips,  cut-up paper strips, and then composition paper to complete the classroom teacher's assignment.   Everything will be done in collaboratively with the teacher since we will be co-planning throughout.  This might take 2 days to complete, but if it boosts student confidence and eases teacher's concerns, it will be worth it!

Give it try.  Your students will love it!

Denise

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