Ages: 6-11
Grades: 1-6

These lessons teach how to infer from pictures, idioms, and short stories. Students learn to determine what's missing and solve object, agent, location, and feelings inferences.

Administer the pre/post assessment to determine what your student understands about making inferences. Then select the skill that best matches his ability level. Your students will work through steps to improve these inference skills:

• What Will Happen Next? — Find a picture that best completes the sequence and explain why. Describe the last step in a picture in the sequence.
• What's Missing? — Find what's missing in object and people pictures and explain why the missing item is important. Identify and explain what's missing in a picture sequence and tell what probably happened between the first and last picture sequence.
• Picture Scene Inferences — Find the absurdities in pictures and explain what is wrong. Use information in a picture to answer questions.
• Object Inferences — Solve riddles with pictures based on the categories animals, transportation, appliance, furniture, clothing, and food. Give as many answers as possible to riddles. Combine clues and determine missing information to solve object riddles with and without pictures.
• Agent Inferences — Decide who is being talked about based on clues and fill in missing information. Picture clues gradually fade.
• Location Inferences — Decide where something happened based on clues and fill in missing information.
• Feelings Inferences — Act out and guess emotions. Infer feelings illustrated in pictures. Decide how someone feels based on clues. Fill in missing information to match the situations. Match feeling words to sentences.
• Making Predictions — Make predictions based on word clues
• Cause and Effect Inferences — Determine the cause of a situation or event based on word clues
• How Would You Know? — Tell how you know something based on word clues
• Inferring From Idioms — Use context clues to determine idiom meanings based on animal and body part themes. Rephrase idioms in sentences.
• Inferring From Short Stories — Read short stories and answer four inference questions about each story.

220 pages • CD-ROM • ©2008