In this lesson, students integrate background knowledge and textual clues to respond to inferential questions that were generated by the students themselves. The lesson utilizes instructional strategies that have been identified as best practice for teaching inference such as: generating questions, identifying keywords, and activating prior knowledge. Additionally, the lesson is designed to support English learners and utilizes visuals, graphic organizers, sentence frames, and cooperative learning.

In this lesson, students use text evidence and schema to create an inference. Students read informational text and practice inferring with varying levels of support.

Students will read a group of words, arrange them to make sense as a complete thought,  and recognize and use capitalization at the beginning and a period as the ending punctuation mark.

Students will research information in order to create a newspaper article about the topic.

First-grade students will rotate through engaging learning stations and read portions of expository texts to identify facts and details embedded within text features.

Students will critically think and communicate; they will summarize a text to understand and make connections to other texts, themselves, and the world.

After students watch a brief video introducing thesis statements, they will create a class thesis statement checklist, use a prompt to write a personal thesis, compare theirs to others in their group while working to craft and revise a group thesis to present to the class after participating in a Gallery Walk where they provide and incorporate revision suggestions. 

Students locate sensory details and create their own sensory detail poem.

Students will explore vocabulary words from other content areas and apply their learning of word parts to find meaning.

Students will actively engage with poetry in a blend of collaborative and independent analysis of poetic devices and an author’s use of devices to communicate a deeper meaning. Students will use their analysis to infer the meaning of a variety of poems.

Students will infer from text evidence the author’s purpose and explain their thinking.

Students will be asked to use metacognition as they analyze a poem, make inferences, and draw conclusions about the overall meaning of a text.

Students will employ critical thinking skills to order details logically and become more effective at communicating their ideas to readers. The lesson will guide students toward using critical thinking in the planning phase of drafting to purposefully include details that interest readers. 

Students learn to determine the difference between topic, central idea, and details using mystery bags, graphic organizers, and short passages.

Students will actively read as a critical component; they will infer in expository text.

Students explore their internal definition of kindness, using visual and textual evidence to collaboratively expand that definition and perform a close reading of a poem. Students then use internal text to express the author’s complex and subtle thematic message.

Students rotate to four posters which contain a single stanza from a common poem (“Digging” by Seamus Heaney), marking key literary elements (imagery, diction, figurative language) before rotating to explain the connotation of the words and phrases selected by the previous group. After text marking, students regroup to discuss the inferential connections between literary terms and their connotative meaning to theorize thematic meaning within the poem.

The class will review previous learning about how authors describe characters using speech, thoughts, effects on others, actions, and looks (STEAL). Students will make annotations on an excerpt using the STEAL strategy. We will talk them through making a guided inference. Students will complete a short-answer response on chart paper with evidence and inference for the focus question

This lesson guides students to use sentence stems to clarify their thinking as they identify and locate text features in isolation while using an interactive text features wall. Students will then transition to gaining information from text features as they search for text features in their books and share the information gained with their partners.  

Students will use mystery bags and graphic organizers to identify clues and use their schema to make an inference. Students conclude this lesson by connecting text as evidence and playing a context clue game with cucumber sentences.