A little more on Inferencing

I posted earlier about my introduction for inferencing with my friendly dog, Scout.  This is what we've been up to since then!

Inferring the meaning of a word:
Thanks to one of my 2nd grade teammates, I used the book The Wretched Stone written by Chris Van Allsburg to discuss how to infer the meaning of a word.  We discussed what we thought the word "wretched" meant, and used orange to write down our predictions about the word before we read.  Luckily, this was a new word to the whole class! Then, as I read we used green to write down our inferences as we read more clues during the book.  About half way through, we stopped making inferences until we had all of our clues at the end.  The pink words were our inferences about the meaning of the word after we had used all of the clues.  We outlined the word "terrible" as the word we felt was our best inference, before confirming in the dictionary.  It was a great visual for the kids to see how our inferences get better with more clues from the author.

Animal Riddles: I used a website that showed animal riddles to get the kids using their schema in a fun way.  They loved guessing the animals, and then I would ask questions about what they already knew to help them make their inferences.  The next day, I wrote my own animal riddle and they had to write down their "schema" for what helped them.  I had them cover up the poem with a folder so they couldn't look at all the clues at once.  It was fun to see how their inferences changed with more clues.

The kids got to write their own "What am I?" poems the next day to put up on our bulletin board.  As you can tell, I have a ranch theme in my room, hence the cowboy hats.  On the board, I stapled a baggie that had post-it notes and sharpened pencils so that the board could be interactive.  When kids switch for math, RtI, or Guided Reading, they can make a quick inference. If their work is done early, they are able to go to the hallway to make some inferences about their friends' poems as well.  Who knew inferencing could be so fun?!

Click here for the sheet they used!

 Here is the title page I used (and updated at home with a graphic) to put on my bulletin board. 

 Title Page

I'm sad that our inferencing unit is almost over, because it is one of my favorites, but glad that these skills will keep coming up in the future!