Inferring

It's an odd thing about school. Sometimes it just seems to make students less smart than they ordinarily are.

This happens a lot during reading. Students who can otherwise make intelligent comments and observations will often just be lost when a teacher asks a questions which is not "on the page." They start to look a little confused and agitated even when the question begins "Why do you think..." I suppose this is because so often in school we are focused on reading carefully and correctly that we forget that the purpose of reading is to promote thinking. So students get into the habit of plodding from word to work, reading the words fairly smoothly, but often not bothering to think what they mean.

We've been working on this problem. We've tackled a couple big thinking skills in reading already - predicting and making connections. We continued on this today by looking at a specific reading skill, the ability to make inferences. I began my lesson by explaining to the students that they were already expert at making inferences, and they proved this to me when I gave them a few facts about an imaginary situation. For example, I told them that they could not see the TV screen but that they heard someone say "doughnuts" and another person say, "Excellent!" They knew immediately that The Simpsons had to be the show on TV. I explained that they had used what they already knew (in this case, Homer's and Mr. Burns' favorite expressions) in order to make this inference.

We then tried to practice the skill on our Open Court story. We had visitors from the Local District looking at our implementation of the reading program, so we used the workbook as our tool today to do this. I will not say that the students were thrilled by the work we did, but they did seem to clearly master the skill. We will continue to work on the skill, though in the future we will be more likely to use post-it notes, reading logs, and graphic organizers to help us here.

The rest of the day was pretty routine. We finished up reading the first chapter of the science book, and most of them finished the chapter 2 math assignments and checked them. A number of students went off to orchestra orientation while the rest of the students went to PE.

Home Studies: (1) Reading, 15 to 30 minutes plus entry in reading log. (2) Open Court Reading worksheets -- Sarah study questions, the crossword puzzles, and the Crazy sentences. (3) Finish the math packet, if not already done.