We only have 3 more days till our fall break and I couldn't be happier...seeing as how I'm on that downward slope of the teacher curve. I am so looking forward to being able to sleep in a little, head to the gym for those morning classes I miss from my summer off, reading, and cleaning house...okay, maybe not the cleaning part.
So I just finished grading and checking my students inferencing (AKA RL.1) post assessment today and my students did so much better than they've done in the past. I wanted to share one of the activities I do, which I got from THIS free resource on TPT from The Teacher Treasury.
RL.5.1: Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
These are meant for a Carousel type activity...and it has to be silent! This is the coolest part of the whole thing. Once you paste up all 15 pictures around your room and students have at it, you won't believe the intensity in their thinking and how silent they can stay. The idea is, you don't want them sharing their opinion with others.
But let me back up...first (as our warm up or lead-in) we watch this awesome 3-minute animated YouTube video, The Defective Detective, I discovered via Pinterest last year. We watch it once to start forming inferences and students can jot down key words, phrases, and anything else they notice in the video from the sounds and sights. They discuss it together and compare inferences. Then we watch it again to try and catch clues they may have missed.
For our "I Do" we take a look at this Promethean/ActivBoard flipchart I found many years ago on Promethean Planet. If someone knows of the source, please let me know here! We use some TPR motions for each part of this little "math equation" and use those TPR motions consistently throughout our work with inferencing. You can see we used a sentence frame in order to practice using evidence as we form those inferences.
You can see our day's goal here...
I do love to have students use either Rally Robin, Round Robin, or even Timed Pair Share afterwards to get them chatting about their inferences and why they came up with what they did. My students did a really nice job of citing their evidence and on several occasions one student changed another's mind about their inference because they missed a piece of information in the picture.
At the end of this lesson, I introduce a quick and simple paragraph and ask my students to complete an exit ticket. I wrote a paragraph about a boy who wakes up late and rushes to get ready for school. He gets annoyed his mom didn't wake him up, but then as he is walking to school he hears church bells, an empty school parking lot...and then he suddenly realizes...So, this gives me a chance to see how they do with inferring from text after practicing with the sentence frame, hand motions, and picture discussions.
What do you think? Have you tried something like this in your classroom for inferencing?
