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Skill Explainer

3.1 Use a Picture to Introduce the Concept of Inferencing

Inferencing Skill Explainer

Marion McBride, M.Ed.
The Simple View of Reading

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

Onset-Rime

Phonemic Awareness

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

Phonics Patterns

Common letter combinations found in words.

Short Vowels Skill Explainer
Closed Syllables Skill Explainer
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
      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.

          Magic 'e' Skill Explainer
          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

                    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.

                    In this photo, we can see a racoon sitting in the grass.

                    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.

                    In this photo, three quarters of the photo are covered for student to practice inferencing.

                    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.

                    This graphic organizer for inferencing is most suitable for young children with images prompts to identify information from the text, visuals, and personal experience.

                    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

                    In this photo, three quarters of the photo are covered for student to practice inferencing.

                    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.

                    In this photo, one-third of the photo is covered for students to practice inferencing.
                    • 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

                    In this photo, we can see a racoon sitting in the grass.

                    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.
                    This graphic organizer provides an example of how a student might organize information from what they see in a picture and what they know from personal experiences to make inferences about the photograph.

                    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.

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