3.1 Use a Picture to Introduce the Concept of Inferencing
Inferencing Skill Explainer
Marion McBride, M.Ed.Word Recognition x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension
Assessment
The process of measuring students' progress and providing information to help guide instruction
Screener
Diagnostic
Formative
Word Recognition
The ability to see a word and know how to pronounce it without consciously thinking about it
Phonological Awareness
A group of skills that enable you to recognize and manipulate parts of spoken words
Articulation
The accurate production of a word or word part and how that word or word part sounds when spoken
Articulation Skill Explainer
Syllables
Part of a word organized around a single vowel sound
Onset-Rime
Two parts of a word: onset is the initial sound; rime is the vowel and any consonant sounds that follow it.
Phonemic Awareness
The ability to recognize and manipulate individual sounds within a spoken word
Phoneme Segmentation and Blending
- Overview of Phoneme Segmentation and Blending
- When to Teach Phoneme Segmentation and Blending
- How to Teach Segmentation and Blending
- Videos: See It in the Classroom
- Lesson Plans for Phoneme Segmentation and Blending
- Assessing Your Students
- What the Research Says
- Resource Hub: Phoneme Segmentation & Blending
Phonics
A method for teaching children the relationship between spoken sounds and written letters so they can learn to decode and encode
Sound-Letter Correspondence
The relationship between a phoneme and the grapheme that spells it
Letter Names and Sounds Skill Explainer
- Overview of Letter Names and Sounds
- When to Teach Letter Names and Sounds
- How to Teach Letter Names and Sounds
- Videos: See It in the Classroom
- Lesson Plans for Letter Names and Sounds
- Student Practice Activities
- Assessing Your Students
- For Students Who Need Additional Support
- What the Research Says
- Resource Hub: Videos, Lessons, Activities
Phonics Patterns
Common letter combinations found in words.
Short Vowels Skill Explainer
- Overview of Short Vowel Sounds
- When to Teach Short Vowel Sounds
- How to Teach Short Vowel Sounds
- Videos: See it in the Classroom
- Lesson Plans for Teaching Short Vowels
- Student Practice Activities with Short Vowels
- Assessing Your Students
- For Students Who Need Additional Support
- Resource Hub: Videos, Lessons, Activities
Closed Syllables Skill Explainer
- Overview of Closed Syllables
- When to Teach Closed Syllables
- How to Teach Closed Syllables
- Lesson Plans for Teaching Closed Syllables
- Videos: See It in the Classroom
- Student Practice Activities
- Assessing Your Students
- For Students Who Need Additional Support
- What the Research Says
- Resource Hub: Videos, Lessons, Activities
Glued Sounds Skill Explainer
Short vs. Long Vowels Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Open Syllables Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Spelling with 'c' vs. 'k' Skill Explainer
- Overview of Spelling with 'c' vs. 'k'
- When to Teach Spelling with 'c' vs. 'k'
- How to Teach Spelling with 'c' vs. 'k'
- Lesson Plans for Spelling with 'c' vs. 'k'
- Videos: See It in the Classroom
- Student Practice Activities
- Assessing Your Students
- Students Who Need Additional Support
- Resource Hub: Videos, Lessons, Activities
Consonant Digraphs Skill Explainer
Blends Skill Explainer
‘-ck’ Pattern Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
FLoSS(Z) Pattern Skill Explainer
‘y’ as a Vowel Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Soft 'c' and Soft 'g' Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
R-Controlled Vowels Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Vowel Teams and Dipthongs Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Trigraphs Skill Explainer
Consonant '-le' Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Schwa Skill Explainer
Coming soon.
Irregularly Spelled High-Frequency Words
High-frequency words that have a part of their spelling that has to be memorized
Irregularly Spelled High-Frequency Words
Multisyllable Words
Words that have more than one word part
Prefixes
How to add meaningful beginnings to words
Suffixes
How to add meaningful endings to words
(active)
Language Comprehension
The ability to understand the meaning of spoken words
Background Knowledge
All the information you acquire over time that is needed to understand language
Oral Language Structures
The elements of speech needed to understand and communicate effectively
Vocabulary
The body of words whose meanings you understand, so you can comprehend and express ideas
Building Word Knowledge Skill Explainer
Morphology
An understanding of how words can be broken down into the smallest units of meaning
Prefixes and Suffixes Skill Explainer
(active)
Reasoning
A critical-thinking skill in which you draw conclusions by analyzing language
Inferencing Skill Explainer
Literacy Knowledge
The recognition that texts have unique elements, organization, structure, and purpose
Reading Comprehension
The ability to understand the meaning of printed text
Text Considerations
Characteristics of a text that impact the ease or difficulty of comprehension.
Strategies and Activities
How a reader approaches a specific text, depending on their purpose for reading
Reader’s Skill and Knowledge
The skills and knowledge a reader brings to the reading task that are necessary for comprehension
Sociocultural Context
Elements in a classroom that affect how well a child learns to read
Fluency
The ability to read accurately with automaticity and expression
Fluency: Accuracy, then Automaticity
Reading or decoding words correctly (accuracy) and reading at an appropriate rate (automaticity)
Fluency: Expressive Text Reading
Reading characterized by accuracy with automaticity and expression
Writing
The act of putting thoughts into print using transcription and composition skills
Handwriting, Spelling, and Typing
Methods for translating speech into written words
Handwriting and Letter Formation Skill Explainer
Sentence Writing
Sentence writing, or syntax, is the system and arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses that make up a sentence
Writing a Simple Sentence Skill Explainer
Sentence Expansion Skill Explainer
- Overview of Sentence Expansion
- When to Teach Sentence Expansion
- How to Teach Sentence Expansion
- Video: See It in the Classroom
- Lesson Plan for Sentence Expansion
- Student Practice Activities
- Assessing Your Students
- For Students Who Need Additional Support
- What the Research Says
- Resource Hub: Videos, Lessons, Activities
Features of Structured Literacy
A systematic and explicit approach to teaching reading based on research
For younger children or students who may struggle with inferencing, using pictures alone, with no text, is a great way to introduce the concept. This activity is not connected to any reading passage. We use it to practice the process of inferencing in isolation.
Step 1: Preparing for the Lesson with a Familiar Picture
Prepare for the lesson by selecting and printing out a picture of an object that most of your students are familiar with. We’ll use a raccoon as an example here.
Use a window template or sticky notes to cover up most of the picture, so that students only see a small portion. Then post the picture in a place that is visible for all students.
Step 2: Introducing the Lesson and Explaining Inferencing
Explain to students that today they’ll be learning about inferencing, which means making thoughtful guesses about something using …
- What we hear or read
- What we see
- What we already know
Inferencing allows us to make meaning of things even when we don’t have all of the information.
Tell your students that their job is to use inferencing to guess who or what is in the picture.
Draw a three-column table on the whiteboard (the graphic organizer we introduced in module 3.0) and use a picture of a book, an eye, and a thought bubble to represent those three sources of information. Use the table to capture students' responses as you complete the exercise.
Explain to students that in this exercise you will only use a picture as your source of information … no reading. Since we won’t get information in a text, write an “X” or “no information” in the column “no information” in the first column, the one with a book in the header.
Step 3: Making Connections with the Picture
Ask students to describe what they see in the picture. With this picture, students might say outdoors, grass, tree, ears, animal, gray, or fur. Go ahead and write these words in your graphic organizer in the second column, under the eyes.
When students name something specific, ask them to explain what they used to figure that out. For example, “I see grass, so I bet the picture is of the outside.”
Step 4: Making Connections with New Information
Uncover more of the picture and prompt students to piece together new information with old.
- Ask students again to describe what they see. Answers for this picture could be fingers, claws, fluffy fur, outdoors, or nature.
- Write the students’ answers in the graphic organizer in the second column. Have students explain how what they know about the things they see (leaves, sharp claws, etc.) helps them make guesses about the picture (it’s outdoors, this is an animal, etc.).
- Ask students what new piece of information is revealed by the larger image that they can connect to earlier information to narrow down their conclusion. For example, “Those aren’t dog or bear paws, so I think it’s not a dog or bear.”
- Then ask them to try naming what the picture is showing using the additional information. If they guess animal sitting, bear, cat, squirrel, or even raccoon, point out that they have used two pieces of information within the picture and their background knowledge about animals to infer what the picture may be.
Step 5: Making Inferences
Finally, reveal the whole picture and students to make an inference. You may:
- Have students name the animal in the picture and what they think the animal is doing.
- Ask them to identify the new information that helps them to know that it is a raccoon, such as its eyes.
- Discuss the guesses that they made earlier and compare them to the full picture.
- Draw attention to the responses that students gave when they relied on their background knowledge, referring back to the graphic organizer.
- Ask students to determine which was the correct inference and circle it on the graphic organizer.
Step 6: Guiding Student Practice
Repeat the exercise with several pictures so that students can have time to practice using this process to make thoughtful guesses. Continue to emphasize the three sources of information: text, visuals, and background knowledge. Make a special effort to have students use their background knowledge to make the inference.