Making Inferences in Nonfiction

It sure has felt like Antarctica at school this week!

    As intermediate readers move into more complex, dense informational texts, they need to make more and more inferences. Talking about these inferences and the thinking behind them is essential.

    I created a new text with embedded questions to help readers get to this level of inferencing. Embedded questions are great for helping readers to notice key details in texts. The text is chunked so that it looks less intimidating, and readers know where they will find the clues they need to devise answers.

Visualizing
    Visualizing is a kind of inference! After all, authors never explain all of their details in a description. Authors depend on readers to fill in critical details from their own prior knowledge. In turn, those details help readers to fill in other gaps in a text.
    Consider the text at the right. How did people try to find a southern land mass? The word "sailors" is a key here. 

1. Read the text aloud with students.
2. Ask students, "Can you find the sentence that helps you to visualize how people tried to find a southern land mass?" Some will be able to; others may be confused by the mention of Greeks at the beginning of the passage.
3. Demonstrate underlining the sentence. 
4. Think aloud: If sailors tried to find Antarctica, what would they be using? Ships! Would they have modern ships? Why or why not? Students may recognize The Age of Exploration as a clue to the time period, or they may not. 
5. What other details from the text could we add to our visualizations? Icebergs, sea ice

    This led to such interesting questions and comments from students. Some students didn't recognize that "southern land mass" refers to Antarctica. Others started wondering--why didn't the sailors steer around the icebergs? Why was the sea ice such a problem? I followed up with a video from my Antarctica playlist to answer their questions at the end of class.


Pronoun/Antecedent Inferences
    Pronoun/antecedent inferences are essential to understanding expository text. Often, students have trouble tracking these, especially when the pronoun is in a different sentence from the antecedent.
    In this example, we marked the text with arrows to show the relationship between the pronoun and the antecedent. This helped to prepare students for the inference question: What is the name of one of the three research stations? 
    If this seems remarkably easy, I assure you that it is not simple for many struggling readers, especially ELLs. We had to discuss whether the station would be "Nathaniel Station" or "Palmer Station", and why! 
 

    Making inferences helps readers to put the pieces of a text together. These kinds of inferences need to be explicitly taught and discussed. 
    To make your own embedded questions, take a look at some informational text that you are sharing with students. Cut it apart and add inference questions--visualizing, pronoun/antecedent, text-based inferences, and reader-based inferences. How do your readers respond? 


For more on kinds of inferences, you can see Chapter 4-7 of my book, The Forest AND the Trees: Helping Readers to Use Details in Texts and Tests.

Here is the Antarctica text that I used in my lesson:

Making inferences from Emily Kissner

Notes
Looking for more texts to compare? I just finished Spring Paired Passages, which includes texts about weather sayings and tulips. Great for test prep, but with interesting enrichment and extension possibilities as well!

Core Reading with Struggling Readers

Early October brings a mix of emotions in the classroom. On the one hand, there is the elation of feeling that we have finally come together as a class. The mix of personalities has settled into a cohesive culture with its own inside jokes, traditions, and routines. (My class this year has taken to making up imaginary students to sit at the empty desks, complete with name labels and supposed personalities. And they have taken on the stuffed toy lobster, which has sat unnoticed on the shelf for years, as a special mascot. I just love to watch these things happen.)

But by early October, I also have a very clear picture of the task that I must accomplish by the end of the year. Looking at the DRA scores of my struggling readers, it was easy to feel daunted by the expectations of the Common Core to get these readers into grade-level reading selections. "How can I do this?" I asked my husband. "How can I get someone at a DRA 18 into a level 40 book?"

My husband, who teaches third grade, was a little calmer than I was. He also has a longer memory. He said, "Didn't you write a whole chapter about that in your book?"

"But it's--" I started, ready to argue, and then I stopped because I realized that he was right. There it was, in The Forest and the Trees, a long section about giving different kinds of support to readers as they work with grade level text. Right.

So I do know how to do this, I thought. As I planned for the upcoming weeks of instruction, I considered my readers carefully. The notion of before, during, and after has helped me to frame my lessons.

Before Reading: Building Automaticity
To build automaticity with the words in the grade level text, I've been making speed drills, flash cards, and word sorts. These look different depending on the text and the groups.

For Weslandia, I pulled out one and two-syllable words. One group focused on the one-syllable words. Words like loom, built, and wove are a real challenge for them. With another group, I worked on syllabication strategies. We worked on words from the text like civilization, innovation, and devise. With each of these lessons, I focused on using a decoding strategy that wouldn't just help students with words from this text, but would help them to decode words in future texts as well.

For Molly's Pilgrim, I pulled out all of the compound words. I made cards by separating them (school/yard) and then we put them back together. In this case, I focused on understanding the compound words. Many students had never heard of a "schoolyard" before, so we talked about making sense of the compound word by putting together the meanings of the other words. I included some other words on the speed drill as well, organized by the number of syllables, so that it was easy to listen to tailor the list for different readers and listen to them read the words over multiple days.

With each of these activities, I also used the words that we practiced to build predictions for the text. "In the text we'll read next week, Molly has trouble reading the word Thanksgiving. Why do you think this might be?" Then we shared our thoughts about why this might happen in the story.

Before Reading: Building Background
It's also important to build background knowledge for all readers. While we were working with Weslandia, I wrote a short little passage about the Roman civilization for students to read as their homework fluency practice. This passage got them to say the word "civilization" repeatedly throughout the week. Because we are also starting our study of Greek and Latin roots, this text built some instant connections between our reading and word study.

During Reading: Strong Sustaining Strategies
I am also working this year to give every reader the chance to independently interact with grade level or approaching grade level text. To make this successful, I have to think very carefully about the sustaining strategies that they will use. Where will they have difficulty? What can I do to support them?

The syllabication strategies we practiced before reading become very important here, as readers have to try to figure out words on their own. This goes hand in hand with the "clicks and clunks" that we've already practiced. Identifying where meaning breaks down is a necessary step to better comprehension. If struggling readers aren't aware of what difficulties they are having, they can't utilize better strategies! After we spend time reading silently, we can talk about where those clunks occurred and how we can fix them.

During Reading: Embedded Questions and Reading Road Maps
I also like to use these activities to help readers make meaning in a text. Embedded questions are simply questions that you insert into the main body of the text. They are a wonderful scaffold for helping readers to make inferences as they read. Think about the key ideas that a reader will need to gather from a section, and then write a question that cues them to think about those ideas.

Reading road maps are similar. They are based in the idea that reading is like a journey. Sometimes they are organized as before, during, and after, as this example. I've stopped trying to make mine "cute" and use a simple table design.

After Reading: Notebook Resources
After students have read the text and we've talked about our clicks and clunks, we go deeper into analyzing the story. Struggling readers and ELL students really benefit from having a notebook full of resources to help them answer questions.

For example, consider character traits. A question might ask, "What trait of the main character helps her to resolve the conflict?" A student who needs help in reading will benefit tremendously from having a list of character traits to refer to while answering this question. This list will help the reader to be able to focus on gathering the text details to support an answer to this question. Lists of themes work in the same way. When a reader has a list of universal themes to refer to, identifying and supporting a theme becomes a much easier task.

Getting students who are reading significantly below grade level to comprehend grade level text is a tough task. By planning scaffolding before, during, and after reading, I can help to make the task a little easier.

A note on materials: I've created several Common Core friendly materials for Weslandia and Molly's Pilgrim...if you would like any, please write to me or leave a comment. (Make sure that you put your email address in the comment! If you don't, I don't have any way to reach you. )

Reading Strategies: Questioning, Inferring, and Clarifying

This week, I worked with my students to review reading strategies. They had wonderful introductions to strategies in third grade, and really remember a great deal. I used the "Strategy Knowledge Rating" from my Reviewing Reading Strategies packet to get a snapshot of what students already know. Knowledge ratings for vocabulary can be tricky things--I've found that kids often tend to overestimate their abilities--but they are still an indicator of background knowledge.

I found that kids were very confident in their ability to predict, visualize, and activate schema, but were a little less sure of how to question, infer, and clarify. (I put the items on a chart and tabulated student responses so that we could see how everyone in the class responded.) My main goal in planning lessons for strategy use, then, was to show students how to integrate strategies, using several together to build meaning.

To model these reading strategies, and how they can all work together, I chose the book Nim and the War Effort. The muted, detailed illustrations grabbed my attention right away. But the setting and the plot made it perfect for these lessons. For my apple orchard rural kids, the Chinatown setting was new. Nim's family and culture were different than my students', but the main problem--Nim wants to collect the most newspapers to win a contest at school--was familiar. This combination of new and familiar is important for modeling strategy use. There needs to be something new to cause students to ask questions, but enough familiarity for students to be able to have some background knowledge to use for making inferences.

Day 1: We previewed the book. Students recognized that it was a narrative (hooray!) and asked questions about the pictures. We read the first few pages. After each page, I paused for students to share their questions with a partner, and then called on a few groups to share their questions for the chart.

Day 2: We continued reading, putting more questions on our chart. When we were able to answer a question, we recorded it on the chart. I led students from asking only literal questions to asking "big story questions."

Day 3: I introduced inferring. We practiced making inferences by looking at pictures from my iPhoto collection. The students know both of my sons, and so they enjoyed looking at some pictures of the boys in different seasons and making inferences about what they were doing.

Then, I told students that we can use the strategy of making inferences to answer some of our questions. We looked back at our two days of questions. Were there any that we could make an inference to answer? We read a few more pages, and then tried to answer some questions that were not stated directly in the text. I knew that we were having success when kids groaned when we finished!

Day 4: I introduced clarifying. We talked about how it's a way for us to think about the author's words and what they meant. Once again, I read a few pages, and we collected more questions and answers. By this point, the students were very invested in the story. At the pauses, kids were talkative and eager to share with their partner.

Day 5: We finished the story! What made this book perfect was the fact that the outcome of the contest was never stated directly--kids had to make an inference to figure out the ending. We talked about how, at the end of a book, we need to take some time to go back through our questions. Sometimes we'll need to make inferences to understand how it all ends.

After the whole group lesson, we practiced integrating the strategies in small groups during guided reading. I used books that were a little below the students' instructional levels:

City Green, by DyAnne Disalvo-Ryan: This book has wonderful picture support that leads students straight toward the important questions and key inferences. The name of the narrator is not revealed until page 13, making this a great book for modeling to figure out who the first person narrator might be.

Squanto's Journey, by Joseph Bruchac: I used this with a group of six boys. There were many opportunities for questioning and making inferences. The flashback structure made it a little more challenging.

Dragonfly's Tale, by Kristina Rodanas: This one was a little harder for the group. The pictures helped them to track with the story.

Train to Somewhere, by Eve Bunting: Another one with a first person narrator. Eve Bunting offers strong support for the less familiar topic. This group had some more trouble with using information from one part of the story to answer questions from an earlier part of the story.

Reviewing reading strategies

At the start of the school year, it's important to review reading strategies with intermediate students. While they have all learned about reading strategies, many of them still have trouble applying strategies in their everyday reading.

This past year, I worked with using academic words across the curriculum. Strategy is a great example of one of those words. An understanding of strategies is important in math, social studies, and science as well as in reading. As I looked at how to review reading strategies, then, I took advantage of the chance to teach the word strategy in its broader context. We tried out strategies in tic-tac-toe, talked about strategies in soccer, and discussed strategies in television shows like The Clone Wars. (Here's the blog post that I wrote at the time.)

I just posted a lesson set with the strategy lessons, reading strategy cards, and student reflection sheets over at TeachersPayTeachers.