Education is constantly changing which is something I LOVE about my job. Who wants to do the same thing over and over again? Not me! Well I never imagined that as a first grade teacher I would have to teach my students about inferencing but that was the case this year. To tackle this skill, I leaned on other teachers for their expertise.
Our first activity was Babbling Abby’s Mystery Box activity. Of course I had to make mine as cute as hers so I ordered these boxes at Amazon. You could really put anything in the box but I decided to go with a hat since we were talking about winter and polar bears that week. This hat actually worked out perfectly because of the black buttons. When we shook the box, it made a loud noise so many students did not guess a hat at first.
You can see our guesses in the red marker. They are clearly off track due to the buttons. After making our guesses, we collected our clues using her template. They love interacting and moving around the room.
After they received all their clues, we gathered together to make our inferences based on their clues. You can see them above in the darker color marker on the web. When it was all said and done, only 1 student had inferred correctly but they were all close! To say that they LOVED this activity is an understatement. They wanted to do it all week. This would be a great take home activity as well. The students could take the box home, fill it and create clues. Then the class could try to infer what it might be. I think we may try this on Fridays!
We also loved Abby Mullins & Cara Caroll’s Animal Inferences. I originally only copied 2 of these for the week but by popular demand, we ended up doing 4. It was really interesting to see some of their guesses. I assumed they would all guess a raccoon on this one but the word nocturnal triggered a few other animals. The owl was a great inference because it does look like it is wearing a mask too.
In addition, we used some of “A Year of Many Firsts” observe and infer pages. My favorite part of this activity was that they had to rely on their schema a lot. They used what they knew to make their inference. Also, when they wrote their inference, they began their sentence with… I infer…
I LOVED IT!
Every week we add leaves to our thankful tree, check out what we were thankful for…. AMAZING!
Finally, we used my January Paired Passages to infer as well. We love using our highlighters to find our text evidence before recording our responses.
If you haven’t yet, I highly suggest you check out these AMAZING resources!
